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The 2018 Winter Olympics are basically halfway over,1 and the usual suspects are off to a great start. The Norwegians, the kings of cross-country skiing, currently lead the medal table with 22 pieces of hardware, including seven golds. The Germans, who traditionally rule luge and biathlon, are not far behind with nine golds and 17 medals. The United States, meanwhile, is in a four-way tie for fifth, having nabbed only nine total medals.

How many should we expect the U.S. to have at this stage of the games, though? Since medals in different sports are awarded at different times, it can be difficult to know whether a country is behind where they should be or right on track. To help with that, we created a simple medal tracker. It compares a given country’s medal count with how many we’d expect based on its historical performance in the sports that have already been completed at this year’s games. It also tells you how many remaining medals a country should pick up over the rest of the Olympics if its athletes play to form. (One note on this: We’re looking at the broad categories of events that make up the Olympics — Alpine skiing, snowboarding, curling, etc. — not the specific events within those categories.)

Here’s how it works: We collected Winter Olympics medal data going back to 1998, when snowboarding was added to the official program as a new sport,2 and then calculated the share of medals that each country won in each sport. For example, from 1998 to 2014, the U.S. won 33 percent of all gold medals in snowboarding, to go with 17 percent of silvers and 30 percent of bronzes. (Yes, we’re pretty good at snowboarding.) Then we used those historical rates to set the baseline expectations — the expected medals — for the 2018 Pyeongchang Games.3 There is one big exception to note: The Olympic athletes from Russia use the Russian Federation’s expected-medal rates, but with a 25 percent reduction to reflect the reduced number of Russian athletes competing in the 2018 Games (plus whatever other negative effects the Russian doping scandal might have on their medal tally).

Add up all of those expected medals, and you can see where a country “should” be based on what it’s good at and what’s happened at the games so far. And the U.S. is definitely underperforming in South Korea, relative to expectations. Based on the events that have already been completed at the games, we would expect to have seen 18 American podium appearances thus far, which is exactly double the number the U.S. has actually had. From Lindsey Jacobellis’s coming up short again in boardercross to Mikaela Shiffrin’s shocking non-medal in slalom, Lindsey Vonn’s super-G struggles and Nathan Chen’s disappointing fifth-place finish in men’s figure-skating, no country is off to a rougher start in Pyeongchang than the Americans.

The good news for the U.S., however, is that there are plenty of medal events remaining in which American athletes excel. Based on its rates over the 1998-2014 period, we would expect the U.S. to pick up about 18 more medals before the games are over, which is more than any other country’s projection. Even if that happens, however, our tracker projects that the U.S. would finish a distant fourth in the final medal table — which would be its worst showing at the Winter Olympics since 1998 — but at least it would mean the second half of the games was a lot better than the first.

For Norway, this is shaping up to be its best performance at the Winter Games ever. Even though a number of their best events are over, the Norwegians should still finish strong. Indeed, if they (and everyone else) simply perform to expected baselines over the rest of the Olympics, Norway will finish first in the standings, with 34 medals, ahead of Germany and Canada.

Who will win the most golds?

Medal projections based on each country’s current medals and historical performance in remaining events, as of the end of competition on Feb. 17

Gold medals

All medals

Country▲▼

Current▲▼

Projected▲▼

Current▲▼

Projected▲▼

Germany

9

13.8

17

30.4

Norway

7

11.4

22

34.1

Netherlands

6

8.9

13

20.5

Canada

5

11.7

15

30.3

United States

5

10.7

9

27.1

Sweden

4

5.6

7

12.6

Austria

3

5.1

9

17.5

France

3

4.7

7

13.7

South Korea

3

5.2

5

9.7

Italy

2

3.1

6

10.3

Switzerland

2

4.5

7

13.7

Belarus

1

1.9

2

3.9

Czech Republic

1

2.0

5

7.7

Great Britain

1

1.2

4

4.9

Japan

1

1.8

9

12.0

Poland

1

1.4

1

2.4

Slovakia

1

1.2

3

3.5

Australia

0

0.9

3

5.0

China

0

1.4

5

10.9

Spain

0

<0.1

2

2.0

Finland

0

0.9

3

8.0

Kazakhstan

0

<0.1

1

1.4

Liechtenstein

0

<0.1

1

1.0

Olympic athletes from Russia*

0

2.7

9

16.6

Slovenia

0

0.2

1

2.1

*Using medal rates for the Russian Federation, but with a 25 percent reduction to reflect that fewer athletes are competing this year, compared to previous games.

One of my least favorite questions is: “Did Russian interference cost Hillary Clinton the 2016 election?” The question is newly relevant because of special counsel Robert Mueller’s indictment of 13 Russians on Friday on charges that they used a variety of shady techniques to discourage people from voting for Clinton and encourage them to vote for Donald Trump. That doesn’t necessarily make it any easier to answer, however. But here are my high-level thoughts in light of the indictment. (For more detail on these, listen to our emergency politics podcast.)

1. Russian interference is hard to measure because it wasn’t a discrete event.

You know what probably did cost Clinton the election? The letter that former FBI Director James Comey sent to Congress on Oct. 28, 2016, and the subsequent media firestorm over it. The impact is relatively easy to measure because it was the biggest news event in the final two weeks of the campaign, and we can compare polls conducted just before the Comey letter to the ones conducted just after it.4

Russian interference isn’t like that. By contrast, the indictment (and previous reporting on the subject) suggests that the interference campaign had been underway for years (since at least 2014) and gradually evolved from a more general-purpose trolling operation into something that sought to undermine Clinton while promoting Trump (and to a lesser degree, Bernie Sanders). To the extent it mattered, it would have blended into the background and had a cumulative effect over the entirety of the campaign.

2. The magnitude of the interference revealed so far is not trivial but is still fairly modest as compared with the operations of the Clinton and Trump campaigns.

The indictment alleges that an organization called the Internet Research Agency had a monthly budget of approximately $1.25 million toward interference efforts by September 2016 and that it employed “hundreds of individuals for its online operation.” This is a fairly significant magnitude — much larger than the paltry sums that Russian operatives had previously been revealed to spend on Facebook advertising.

Nonetheless, it’s small as compared with the campaigns. The Clinton campaign and Clinton-backing super PACs spent a combined $1.2 billion over the course of the campaign. The Trump campaign and pro-Trump super PACs spent $617 million overall.

In terms of headcounts rather than budgets, the gap isn’t quite so dramatic. The “hundreds” of people working for the Internet Research Agency compare with 4,200 paid Clinton staffers5 and 880 paid Trump staffers.6 Russian per-capita GDP is estimated at around $10,000 U.S. dollars — about one-sixth of what it is in the U.S. — so a $1.25 million monthly budget potentially goes a lot farther there than it does here. The Russian efforts were on the small side as compared with the massive magnitudes of the campaigns, but not so small that you’d consider them a rounding error.

3. Thematically, the Russian interference tactics were consistent with the reasons Clinton lost.

How did Trump win? Or more to the point, how did Trump win given that he only had a 38 percent favorability rating among people who voted on Election Day? The answer is partly the Electoral College, of course. But it’s also that Clinton was really, really unpopular herself — almost as unpopular as Trump — with a favorability rating of just 43 percent among Election Day voters. Also, the substantial number of voters who disliked both Clinton and Trump went to Trump by a 17-point margin. Voters really weren’t willing to give Clinton the benefit of the doubt.

That’s largely because Clinton was viewed as dishonest and untrustworthy, exactly the sort of message that the Russian campaign (which used hashtags such as #Hillary4Prison) was trying to cultivate. Trump, of course, was trying to cultivate this message too. Media coverage often struck the same themes. And voters sometimes heard variations on this theme from Sanders and his supporters in the more contentious moments of the Democratic primaries. Was some of this Clinton’s fault? Yep, of course. Would Clinton still have been “Crooked Hillary” even without the Russians? Almost certainly. But the Russians were at least adding fuel to the right fire — the one that wound up consuming Clinton’s campaign.

The indictment also alleges that the Russian conspirators sought to suppress African-American turnout. A decline in black turnout was an important — perhaps even decisive — factor in Clinton’s defeat, although it may have been inevitable given that Barack Obama, the first African-American president, had been on the ballot in 2012.

But if it’s hard to prove anything about Russian interference, it’s equally hard to disprove anything: The interference campaign could easily have had chronic, insidious effects that could be mistaken for background noise but which in the aggregate were enough to swing the election by 0.8 percentage points toward Trump — not a high hurdle to clear because 0.8 points isn’t much at all.

Perhaps there are more clever methodologies that one could undertake. For instance, if we knew which states the efforts were concentrated in, we might be able to make a few additional inferences. Maybe some of that information will come to light as the result of Mueller’s probe and further investigative reporting. For the time being, however, we’re still somewhat in the dark.

The investigation by special counsel Robert Mueller into Russian interference in the 2016 election took a significant step forward Friday, with the indictment of 13 Russian nationals and and three Russian organizations along with the announcement of a guilty plea from a California man for identity fraud.

The indictment and guilty plea are important because they are the first charges related to Russian attempts to sabotage the election. (The other indictment and pleas in the Mueller investigation have been in relation to other criminal activities.) The election interference is an activity long denounced by the U.S. intelligence community but routinely called into question by President Trump.

The indictment is also the latest sign that Mueller’s investigation is still moving quickly and ambitiously in pressing charges against those involved.

Our analysis of special counsel probes in the modern era, starting in 1979,7 puts Mueller’s investigation in select company for producing criminal charges at all — a majority of the investigations over the past four decades ended without charges being filed against anyone.

The total number of individuals charged in the investigation is now up to 18,8 including an indictment and two guilty pleas from last fall. One of the defendants from last fall, Rick Gates, is reportedly finalizing a plea deal, which would signal that he’s ready to cooperate with the investigation.

Historically, major special counsel investigations that have led to charges have lasted for years, with indictments and guilty pleas trickling out as an inquiry gains momentum. So more charges seem likely to come.

In an emergency edition of the FiveThirtyEight Politics podcast, the team responds to news that a grand jury has indicted 13 Russian individuals and three companies as part of special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into Russian meddling in the 2016 election. The indictments detail an extensive effort to sow chaos in U.S. politics, including during the 2016 presidential election.

The FiveThirtyEight Politics podcast publishes Monday evenings, with occasional special episodes throughout the week. Help new listeners discover the show by leaving us a rating and review on iTunes. Have a comment, question or suggestion for “good polling vs. bad polling”? Get in touch by email, on Twitter or in the comments.

Shuri (played by Letitia Wright10) is the sister of T’Challa, the king of Wakanda and the film’s titular character. She oversees the technological operations of the superscientific nation. If you’re comparing T’Challa to James Bond, she’s Q.

She’s also the funniest character in the movie, steals every scene she’s in and — for my money — the most important character.

This potential is essential to the character and factors into Wright’s performance; the actress told Vogue: “I hope it can spark someone to say, ‘I’m not a superhero, but I can be a scientist or build the next spaceship, like Shuri.’”

Movies can have an even longer lasting impact. A good movie changes the audience, and we have tons of evidence to back that up:

After the release of “The Hunger Games” and “Brave” in 2012 — both of which feature women protagonists who use a bow and arrow — girls’ participation in archery competitions doubled, according to a study by the Geena Davis Institute on Gender in Media, citing data from USA Archery. The study also found that 7 in 10 girls reported that the protagonists in those films had influenced their decision to take up the sport.

I could go on, but the point is this: On the one hand, sure, movies are a product engineered to optimize financial windfalls for a small group of corporations and intellectual property holders. But on the other hand, I personally got interested in math because of Ian Malcolm, rock-star chaos theory mathematician in “Jurassic Park,” and you would not be reading this if not for that.

So “Black Panther” is a big deal for a lot of reasons, but Shuri is chief among them.

Every two years, the Olympics give Americans a chance to feel good about themselves. In the summer, U.S. swimmers and track stars consistently reign superior — and its gymnasts are usually right there, too. The American basketball team, now borrowed from the NBA, often seems like it could sleep through the first half and still coast past most of the other countries. Because of this, the U.S. has finished atop the medal table for every Summer Games since 1996.

In the winter, the U.S. has grown accustomed to a similar degree of success, albeit not with nearly the same level of global domination. Since the U.S. hosted the 2002 Winter Games in Salt Lake City, the Americans have finished no lower than second on the medal table, with the 2010 Vancouver Games providing a high-water mark of 37 medals. So far in Pyeongchang, Team USA has won eight medals through Thursday, and five of those medals were golden.

But for anybody old enough to remember the Cold War, American success in the winter may seem a little odd. For decades, the U.S. was pretty, well, meh — never bad enough to get shut out, but more often than not looking up at the Soviets, Austrians and Norwegians. So what changed? The answer is obvious: It’s flying through the air, performing a chicken salad or a double Michalchuk.

Since the 1990s, Americans have retained their stranglehold on sports you might see in a Mountain Dew ad. Freestyle skiing aerials were introduced in the 1994 Winter Olympics in Lillehammer, and snowboarding came along four years later in Nagano, Japan — with more individual events added in these sports each winter cycle.

From 1994 to 2014, the U.S. racked up 34 medals in those two disciplines, 18 of which came on the halfpipe alone.11 The U.S. has been on the same track so far in South Korea. A pair of 17-year-olds named Chloe Kim and Red Gerard — who claimed Olympic gold in women’s halfpipe and men’s slopestyle, respectively — have been the emerging stars. Shaun White, meanwhile, avenged his forgettable performance in Sochi and returned to the top of the men’s halfpipe podium; Jamie Anderson snagged a gold in women’s slopestyle; and Arielle Gold stood next to teammate Kim on the halfpipe podium, a bronze slung around her neck.

With those five freestyle medals in the bag, Team USA is well on its way to matching the 11 it won in Sochi. But even when you get away from the halfpipe, the U.S. has capitalized on other newly introduced events as well, such as two-woman bobsled, women’s ice hockey and skeleton.12

In which new Olympic events does the U.S. shine?

Medals won by the United States in events that have been added to the Winter Olympics since 1994

Medals

Sport▲▼

Event▲▼

U.S.▲▼

Total▲▼

Share▲▼

Freestyle skiing

Men’s slopestyle

3

3

100.0%

Snowboarding

Women’s halfpipe

10

18

55.6

Snowboarding

Men’s halfpipe

9

18

50.0

Bobsled

Two-woman

5

13

38.5

Figure skating

Team trophy

2

6

33.3

Freestyle skiing

Men’s halfpipe

1

3

33.3

Freestyle skiing

Women’s halfpipe

1

3

33.3

Freestyle skiing

Women’s slopestyle

1

3

33.3

Hockey

Women’s

5

15

33.3

Nordic combined

Individual large hill/10km

2

6

33.3

Snowboarding

Men’s slopestyle

2

6

33.3

Snowboarding

Women’s slopestyle

2

6

33.3

Snowboarding

Men’s snowboard cross

3

12

25.0

Short track speedskating

Men’s 1,500m

3

15

20.0

Skeleton

Women’s

2

11

18.2

Freestyle skiing

Men’s aerials

3

18

16.7

Skeleton

Men’s

2

12

16.7

Short track speedskating

Men’s 500m

2

18

11.1

Snowboarding

Women’s snowboard cross

1

9

11.1

Speedskating

Men’s team pursuit

1

9

11.1

Snowboarding

Men’s parallel giant slalom

1

12

8.3

Snowboarding

Women’s parallel giant slalom

1

12

8.3

Freestyle skiing

Women’s aerials

1

18

5.6

Short track speedskating

Women’s 1,000m

1

18

5.6

Biathlon

Mass start men

0

9

0.0

Biathlon

Mass start women

0

9

0.0

Biathlon

Men’s pursuit

0

15

0.0

Biathlon

Women’s 4×6 relay

0

9

0.0

Biathlon

Women’s pursuit

0

15

0.0

Cross-country skiing

Men’s sprint

0

15

0.0

Cross-country skiing

Men’s team sprint

0

9

0.0

Cross-country skiing

Women’s sprint

0

15

0.0

Cross-country skiing

Women’s team sprint

0

9

0.0

Curling

Mixed

0

3

0.0

Curling

Women’s

0

15

0.0

Freestyle skiing

Men’s ski cross

0

6

0.0

Freestyle skiing

Women’s ski cross

0

6

0.0

Luge

Team relay

0

6

0.0

Short track speedskating

Women’s 1,500m

0

12

0.0

Ski jumping

Women’s individual normal hill

0

6

0.0

Snowboarding

Men’s parallel slalom

0

3

0.0

Snowboarding

Women’s parallel slalom

0

3

0.0

Speedskating

Women’s team pursuit

0

9

0.0

Does not include medals that were subsequently stripped.

Men’s skeleton appeared in 1928 and 1948 and then returned for good in 2002. This study considers men’s 30km skiathlon, women’s 15km skiathlon and Nordic combined normal hill as continuations of earlier events.

Through the end of competition Thursday.

Source: Sports-reference.com, International Olympic Committee

We really only have to go back to Sochi 2014 to see how this has affected the medal table. In Russia, Team USA won 28 medals, which was roughly 10 percent of the total medals awarded that year — just one behind the Russians for the overall lead.13 But if you were to eliminate events that were introduced in Lillehammer ’94 and beyond, the Americans would have finished with just 11 medals, or roughly 7 percent of the total medals awarded that year in those longer-term sports.

With their medals in X-Games sports, Team USA were very nearly on top of the Winter Olympics world in 2014. Without those medals, they would have finished in a relatively pedestrian tie for sixth place.

Look at Team USA’s overall performances from 1964 through 1992, and this follows: They finished in the top five in terms of overall medals only twice in eight tries. Calgary ’88 was a low point — American athletes won just six medals. But all that mediocrity has been flipped on its head as the list of events grows.

It should be said that the big air crowd aren’t the only American athletes responsible for this recent stretch of Winter Olympic team success (or who’ve benefited from events added to the games in the past three decades): Speedskaters like Apolo Anton Ohno and Shani Davis have had brilliant careers, and their achievements on ice also helped to augment Team USA’s recent medal hauls.

To be sure, more traditional Winter Olympians like skiers Ted Ligety, Lindsey Vonn and Mikaela Shiffrin — and their predecessors like Tommy Moe, Picabo Street and Bode Miller — have assured that Team USA remains a threat in the Alpine events. The Americans aren’t exactly Austrians on the slopes, but they’re not exactly Bulgarians, either. But outside of the Alpine realm, don’t expect the Americans to impress in the more historic events: They’ve captured just one medal each in curling, ski jumping and cross-country skiing, and they’ve won exactly zero medals in biathlon.

The cynical take is that this stuff looks really good on TV, and it’s all a big ratings grab for NBC, which has owned the U.S. broadcasting rights for the Winter Olympics since 2002. Whatever the impetus for adding new sports, and especially new extreme sports, the Americans continue to capitalize. It should be noted here that Canada has had a similar windfall: While the U.S. has totaled 64 medals in the events introduced in 1994 and beyond,14 Canada has captured 55.

The Americans aren’t at the top of the medal table right now, but they still have events like ski aerials, ski slopestyle, ski halfpipe and the debut event of snowboarding big air — the most X-Games-y of X-Games-y sports — so there are plenty more opportunities to do what they do best. Now if only they could figure out how to slide a rock across a narrow sheet of ice toward a bullseye, they’d really be onto something.

4 flopped bills

President Trump’s decision to scrap Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA), which allows people who were brought to the U.S. at a young age to remain in the country without fear of deportation, is coming to a head. The program expires March 5, and the U.S. Senate failed to pass four separate immigration bills on Thursday. Needing 60 votes to pass, the main bipartisan compromise got 54, another bipartisan plan got 52, Trump’s preferred plan (which would also cut legal immigration) got 39 and a fourth piece of legislation to simply punish sanctuary cities got 54 votes. [Yahoo]

9-4

The 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Richmond, Virginia, ruled 9-4 against the Trump administration’s proposed ban on travelers from six largely Muslim nations. The court looked at administration rhetoric and the presidential proclamation announcing the ban, and concluded that it “second-guesses our nation’s dedication to religious freedom and tolerance.” [The Associated Press]

11229

It turns out that a cryptocurrency miner operating a power-intensive rack of computers somewhere in the zip code 11229 was responsible for the static T-Mobile users in southern Brooklyn were hearing, according to agents for the Federal Communications Commission. The FCC has directed the miner — who really should do some research because New York City is hardly the ideal place (one with cheap power) to build a rig — to disable the interfering Antminer s5 Bitcoin Miner. [Bloomberg]

150,000 students

More than 150,000 students attending at least 170 primary and secondary schools have experienced a school shooting in the U.S. since the 1999 Columbine High School massacre, according to the Washington Post. That would seem a pretty stunning statistic, yet the nonprofit group Everytown for Gun Safety is still pushing inflated school shooting stats. [The Washington Post]

$26 million

President Trump’s inauguration committee steered $26 million to a firm, WIS Media Partners, controlled by First Lady Melania Trump’s longtime friend, Stephanie Winston Wolkoff. Apparently Wolkoff founded the firm about a month and a half before the inauguration. She has since been brought on as a senior advisor to Melania Trump’s official government office. [The New York Times]

320 million cubic meters of sand

An archipelago of islands built to resemble a map of the world in Dubai is once again trying to make a hard sell to investors. It took five years of dredging 320 million cubic meters of sand and 25 million tons of rock to build the vain and ridiculous array, and then like a few months later the global economy collapsed and all plans to develop them went kaput. But the economy is back, baby, and the government investment arm that owns the archipelago is itchy to sell again. [The Guardian]

Welcome to The Riddler. Every week, I offer up problems related to the things we hold dear around here: math, logic and probability. There are two types: Riddler Express for those of you who want something bite-size and Riddler Classic for those of you in the slow-puzzle movement. Submit a correct answer for either,15 and you may get a shoutout in next week’s column. If you need a hint or have a favorite puzzle collecting dust in your attic, find me on Twitter.

Riddler Express

From Andrew Young, a score-settling puzzle from the schoolyard:

Three expert dodgeballers engage in a duel — er, a “truel” — where they all pick up a ball simultaneously and attempt to hit one of the others. Any survivors then immediately start over, attempting to hit each other again. All of the combatants have perfect accuracy and will eliminate any target they hit (dodgeball this is not), without the possibility of a return volley. Two of the players are fast, and one is slow. If a fast player and the slow player target each other, the fast one always wins. If the two fast players target each other, each has a 50 percent chance of winning. A fast player is not fast enough to throw twice before the slow player gets a first throw off, so the slow player will win when targeting a fast player who isn’t targeting him or her. All players are aware of the abilities of the other players.

Assuming each dodgeballer pursues an optimal strategy, with the goal being survival, what are the odds of victory for one of the fast players and the slow player?

Riddler Classic

Consider another truel — one where the three combatants are equally fast but unequally accurate. Name them Abbott, Bob and Costello. Each has an accuracy of a, b and c, respectively. That is, if Abbott aims at something, he hits it with probability a, Bob with probability b and Costello with probability c. The abilities of each player are known by the others.

Let’s say Abbott is a perfect shot: a = 1. Again, suppose the players follow an optimal strategy. Which player, for every possible combination of Bob and Costello’s abilities (b and c), is favored to survive this truel? (You are welcome to submit your answer as a diagram, if you’d like.)

Solution to last week’s Riddler Express

Last week’s problems were inspired by a paper from a team of mathematicians and computer scientists that was presented at a conference called “Fun With Algorithms” in 2012. They all had to do with hanging a picture frame by a cord in slightly odd and very specific ways such that you could guarantee, under certain circumstances, that the frame would crash to the ground. Why? Because Riddler Nation, as you know, is a strange, mysterious and arbitrary place.

For the Riddler Express, you were asked to hang your frame from two nails in such a way that the removal of either nail would cause the frame to fall. If you imagine hanging a picture from two nails in a “normal” way, the removal of one nail would simply leave the picture hanging from the other nail, although maybe a bit askew. So we’ll need to do something different.

There’s not much of a silver mathematical bullet here, and most solvers arrived at the hanging method via trial and error. The trick, of course, is to arrange the cord such that the frame’s reliance on one nail is dependent on the other, and vice versa. That way, when one nail goes, the whole shebang collapses. This can be accomplished with loops. Solver Thomas Epp explained: “Pulling out either nail will cause the loop around that nail to vanish, and the cord ends up no longer wrapped around the other nail.” Thomas illustrated his solution in the Picasso-esque illustration below:

Our winner, Daniel, arrived at his solution after “lots of random drawings in my notebook, followed by wrapping my headphone cord around two cups with straws in them to test my solution.” MacGyver, eat your heart out.

Others thought outside the box, er, the frame. Ryan Garwood proposed a simple, elegant and, frankly, illicit solution: Ignore the cord altogether. Simply pound two nails into the wall, a bit apart, level with each other, and balance the frame on top of them. Remove one nail and down tumbles the frame.

Solution to last week’s Riddler Classic

Last week’s Riddler Classic asked you to extend the frame puzzle to three and four nails. It also asked about an option using two red nails and two blue nails, where removing both nails of one color caused the picture to fall, but removing one nail of each color left the picture hanging.

The math paper mentioned above introduces some mathematical notation to describe various methods of picture hanging, and it connects these puzzles to the mathematical fields of group theory and algebraic topology. Suppose there are N nails to contend with. For one given nail from those N, call it i, \(x_i\) means wrapping the cord around that ith nail clockwise, while \(x_i^{-1}\) means wrapping the cord around the ith nail counterclockwise. Stringing these symbols together will create our particular picture-hanging recipes.

Laurent Lessard provided excellent illustrations of these solutions. In his diagrams, which show a progression of arrangements toward an end solution, Laurent used the mathematical symbols for “and” (∧) and for “or” (∨). So, for example, in the first image below, the frame falls if nails A and B and C are removed. In the second image, it falls if nail A or nails B and C are removed. The third image is our solution: The frame falls if nails A or B or C are removed.

A similar process works for four nails. In the first image below, all of the nails must be removed for the frame to fall. In the final image, however, removing any of the nails will do.

Finally, for the question about two red nails and two blue nails, the solution is: \(x_1 x_2 x_3 x_4 x_2^{-1} x_1^{-1} x_4^{-1} x_3^{-1}\), where nails 1 and 2 are red and 3 and 4 are blue.

But we’ve actually already seen the solution above! It was an intermediate step in the final illustration — just imagine that A and B are red and C and D are blue. It is also essentially the same problem as the Riddler Express. Just image one of the two nails being two red nails and the other being two blue nails, and the same logic holds.

I, for one, am glad this solution is now finally published. My neighbors were not pleased with the incessant hammering coming from my apartment this past week.

Want to submit a riddle?

Poll of the Week

Gallup’s most recent weekly survey, conducted from Feb. 5 to 11, showed President Trump’s job approval rating among self-identified Republicans at 86 percent. It was the third straight week that his rating was above 85 percent — an improvement compared with 2017. Trump’s support among Republicans spent much of last year in the low 80s, even dipping into the 70s at times.

SurveyMonkey polling from the first week of February shows a similar pattern: 89 percent of Republicans16 said they approve of Trump’s handling of his job as president. And the share of Republicans who “strongly approve” — in the mid-50s for much of last year — is up to 61 percent.

It’s not totally clear why Trump is getting a boost among Republicans. Perhaps positive economic news has brought some wary GOP voters home. Perhaps Republican partisans are happy that Trump and the GOP-controlled Congress passed some major legislation. But that increased support is showing up in Trump’s overall approval rating. It was stuck in the high 30s for a lot of last year but is now in the low 40s.

Presidents traditionally have overwhelming support from Americans in their own parties. But Trump’s support among Republicans in 2017 was soft, at least by recent historical standards. George W. Bush’s approval rating, for example, didn’t fall below 85 percent among Republicans during his first year in office, according to Gallup, and Obama’s was generally in the high 80s and low 90s among Democrats throughout 2009.

White House chief of staff John Kelly appears to have bungled the administration’s handling of an official who was allowed to remain in a top administration post even after the FBI told the White House about its investigation that revealed accusations he had abused his two ex-wives.17 But what congressional Republican would call for Kelly to resign and risk pissing off the president and perhaps his base or the GOP base, which may now be essentially one and the same?

Other polling nuggets

O-No? A poll released last week by Meredith College, which is in Raleigh, North Carolina, found Oprah Winfrey trailing Trump in the state in a hypothetical 2020 election head-to-head matchup. Trump was at 48 percent, compared with Winfrey’s 38 percent. Yes, it’s 2018. We have no idea who is running in 2020, and Winfrey probably isn’t.

As recently as 2010, there were more self-described conservatives than self-described liberals in all 50 states, according to Gallup. That’s no longer the case. By the end of 2016, there were more liberals than conservatives in four states (Connecticut, Massachusetts, New York and Vermont). And in Gallup data released last week, that number was up to nine, with the addition of California, Maryland, Oregon, Rhode Island and Washington.

In a recent NPR/Ipsos poll, more than three-quarters of Democrats, Republicans and independents told pollsters that it was “true” that Latinos are the fastest-growing demographic group in the U.S. (That’s wrong: Asians are the fast-growing group.)

According to a Marist poll released this week, 68 percent of Americans believe that there is intelligent life on other planets. Only about half of Americans believed that in May 2005, when Marist last asked. Among those who believe in intelligent extraterrestrial life, about half believe that aliens are more intelligent than humans and that they will find us before we find them.

A recent Marist poll found that 41 percent of Americans think Russia is “likely” or “very likely” to interfere with the U.S. midterm elections; 53 percent said such interference was “not very likely” or “not likely at all.” Meanwhile, a Morning Consult poll found that 44 percent of registered voters believe that it’s “very” or “somewhat” likely that Russia will try to influence the 2020 presidential election; 32 percent said it was “not too likely” or “not likely at all.”

Recent polls by YouGov, Morning Consult and Public Policy Polling all asked how Americans felt about holding a parade of military convoys in Washington later this year (an idea that Trump has floated). The polls showed Americans split on the issue, with opinions divided by party about as you’d expect:

Support for military parades follows party lines

Share of people who support or oppose a military parade, February 2018

Democrats

Republicans

Pollster

Support

Oppose

Net

Support

Oppose

Net

YouGov

17%

68%

-51

63%

23%

+40

Morning Consult

31

48

-17

67

17

+50

Public Policy Polling

17

73

-56

56

32

+24

Average

22

63

-41

62

24

+38

Note: YouGov results are among adults; Morning Consult and PPP’s are among registered voters.

34 percent of respondents (including 20 percent of Democrats and 60 percent of Republicans) said they believed the “deep state” was working to overthrow Trump, according to a YouGov poll from January.

California Sen. Dianne Feinstein, a Democrat, is ahead of Democratic challenger Kevin de León 46 percent to 17 percent in the June primary, according to a new Public Policy Institutute of California poll. De León, leader of the California Senate, is running as a liberal alternative to the longtime senator. (The two top finishers, no matter their parties, move on to the general election.)

According to a Selzer & Co. poll of Iowans: 73 percent believe that the state of local mental health services is either a big problem or in crisis, 78 percent favor legalizing marijuana for medical purposes, 58 percent oppose legalizing marijuana for recreational purposes, 81 percent believe that a pathway to citizenship for participants in the federal Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program is a worthy goal, and 65 percent said the same for undocumented workers as a whole.

When registered voters in New York were asked by Quinnipiac University if they wanted to see New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio, New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo or U.S. Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand of New York run for president in 2020, a majority said “no thanks” to all three.

The Canadian polling firm Insights West surveyed a representative sample of Canadians who are in a relationship and found that 62 percent agreed that Valentine’s Day is a waste of time and money. Yet, only 33 percent didn’t plan to buy a gift.

Trump’s job approval rating

Trump’s job approval rating is at 41.5 percent, while his disapproval rating is at 53.2 percent. Last week, his approval rating was 41 percent, compared with a disapproval rating of 54 percent.

The generic ballot

The Democrats hold a 46.9 percent to 40.4 percent advantage on the generic congressional ballot this week. Last week, Democrats were up 47.1 percent to 40.2 percent.

The White House lost three officials in the span of seven days, and there are mounting calls for chief of staff John Kelly to step down amid criticism of his handling of abuse allegations against one of the aides. This kind of turmoil has long roiled the Trump’s administration: The president lost three Cabinet heads in the first year of his term — far more Cabinet turnover than in any other recent president’s first year — and saw an exodus of senior advisers that also outpaced his recent predecessors.

But will the rapid pace of departures harm the Trump administration in the long term? After all, turnover is baked directly into our system of government: Each president is responsible for naming about 4,000 political appointees, many of whom leave within three years of taking the job. It’s possible, as we noted last year, that while frequent turnover might seem like it would breed chaos, it could also be a sign of learning or adapting.

To get a sense for the possible ramifications of a particular departure, here are five questions to ask every time a high-level official resigns or is fired, based on the research on leadership shake-ups within the corporate world and the public sector.

1. How long was this person on the job?

Turnover is unavoidable within the federal bureaucracy, and that’s not always a bad thing. In fact, political scientists agree that some changes in leadership are necessary for a functioning democracy.

Frequent turnover, though, can create a number of problems, which is why it’s important to take a look at how long a departing leader has been in his or her position. Shorter tenures and repeated transitions of power are connected18 to more disruption overall, according to Margarethe Wiersema, a professor of strategic management at the University of California, Irvine who studies CEO turnover and succession. She said that although the corporate world is different from the public sector, many lessons from research about CEO departures are broadly applicable to an “organization” like the Trump administration.

“It takes awhile for any leader to settle in,” Wiersema said. “Organizations are driven by their leaders’ goals and vision, and it creates a lot of institutional inefficiency and confusion if that leader leaves just as they’re getting a sense for how things work. It means everything starts all over again with the new person.”

A pattern of shorter tenures may also encourage workers in federal agencies to assume that long-term projects won’t go forward, according to David Lewis, a political science professor at Vanderbilt University. One of his studies, on the difference between political appointees and career civil servants, found that the shorter stays and lack of relative experience of appointees contributed to the relatively worse track record of the programs they ran, while another study of the Department of Defense concluded that longer tenures were related to better program performance.

Lewis said these outcomes are related to the confusion caused by short tenures, which in turn affects federal agencies’ ability to produce effective policy. “When there’s a lot of volatility in leadership, civil servants become unwilling to do anything new or innovative because they think the person in charge is on the way out the door,” he explained.

2. Was the departure planned?

One of the reasons that predictable government turnover isn’t typically more disruptive is that the workforce tends to know what to expect, according to Anne Joseph O’Connell, a professor of law and political science at the University of California, Berkeley who studies political appointees and the federal bureaucracy.

“Federal employees are used to leadership leaving on a certain timeline, generally every two to four years, and that’s expected and planned for,” O’Connell said. Agency heads and Cabinet secretaries sometimes return to former jobs in the private sector or academia after a set period of time; there’s also frequently a changing of the guard after four years even if a president is re-elected. For example, Barack Obama and George W. Bush both used the first year of their second term to install more than a dozen new Cabinet heads each.

Controversy-ridden departures, on the other hand, are difficult to plan for and may create a sense that any leader could be the next to go, O’Connell warned. That creates day-to-day uncertainty for employees and can produce a broader public impression that the administration is incompetent or unfocused.

3. Is there a clear reason for the departure?

Sometimes, senior leaders in the private sector are fired as a signal that an organization is responding to an internal problem, regardless of whether that problem is related to the departing leader. It’s easier to justify the firing of someone who is underperforming or embroiled in scandal, experts said, than the dismissal of well-respected leaders when the reasons for their firing aren’t obvious.

One study from the corporate world found that markets are likelier to respond positively to new leaders when prior performance is poor and negatively when prior performance is good. Otherresearch concluded that turnover is more likely to be viewed by employees as an adaptive event — rather than something turbulent — when the organization’s strategy has shifted away from the outgoing leader’s vision.

Ousting a high-profile official can, in some cases, make a president appear that he’s taking a problem seriously, as when Bush announced the departure of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, who was associated with the unpopular Iraq War, just after Democrats’ sweeping victories in the 2006 midterms.

But Wiersema said that firing a senior leader won’t always be enough if the organization’s first response was denial or defensiveness. “The point isn’t to put a head on the chopping block,” she said. “It’s to signal that the organization is acknowledging a problem and responding to it.”

4. How senior is the person who’s leaving?

One important factor presidents often forget is that “organizations depend on teams, not just leaders,” according to Max Stier, president and CEO of the Partnership for Public Service, a nonprofit that works on effective government strategies. And when the most senior officials leave, like a Cabinet secretary or high-level aide, there’s a “cascading” effect as their hand-picked team members depart with them.

A similar phenomenon exists in the corporate world: Some studies have shown that when CEOs are forced out, a significant number of executives tend to leave with them, which can create serious setbacks for long-term projects. The departure of entire groups of people, rather than just a single leader, creates similar problems in the public sector, Stier said.

O’Connell said that one piece of good news for Trump is that by leaving many political appointments unfilled, he may be blunting the impact of replacing all of the senior leadership staff who leave when a high-level official resigns or is fired. That may create other problems with productivity but results in less upheaval when there’s a change of leadership.

5. How easily can this person be replaced?

In some cases, leadership turnover happens because the president realizes there’s a better person out there. Research by Kathryn Dunn Tenpas, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution who studies the executive branch, found that turnover in a president’s first year is sometimes a sign that he’s turning away from campaign aides and toward advisers with more experience in governance.

But some senior leaders are more difficult to replace than others, according to Tenpas. It’s less challenging to find successors to Cabinet secretaries, she said, because a personal relationship with the president isn’t a requirement for their job. White House aides, on the other hand, don’t only need specialized skills for their position — they need to have a rapport with the chief executive. This is especially true for high-level positions within the White House like the chief of staff: “Finding someone who works well with the president on a day-to-day basis can be really, really difficult,” she said. “It’s also disruptive for the president personally when someone in one of those close roles leaves.”

In some cases, Trump has chosen simply not to replace a departing official, or he’s assigned someone already within the administration to take over a newly vacated job. For example, when Richard Cordray stepped down as the head of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau in November, Mick Mulvaney was appointed as acting director — despite the fact that he was already in charge of the White House budget office.

Tenpas predicted that this move could damage the morale of CFPB workers and reduce efficiency within the organization since Mulvaney’s attentions are divided. This is likely a strategic choice, since the CFPB is an Obama-era agency that the Trump administration appears to be stripping of its enforcement powers. But absent that, assigning two leadership positions to one person is generally not a recipe for a healthy organization, Tenpas warned.

Predicting what will happen in the second year of Trump’s presidency is a plainly futile mission. But the experts on turnover — regardless of whether they study the private or public sector — expressed concern about the effects of allowing the executive branch’s revolving door to continue to spin quickly. Some said they were worried about the impact of leadership turbulence and widespread vacancies on the federal workforce, while others said they were concerned about the growing public perception that the administration is in disarray.

“There’s unconventional, and then there’s unprofessional,” Tenpas said. “It’s still early in (Trump’s) presidency, of course, but it’s a problem if it looks like the executive branch is in chaos.”

Things That Caught My Eye

Harry Kane on the Tottenham Hotspur got his 100th goal in the English Premier League two weeks ago, with only Alan Shearer accomplishing it in fewer games. This season alone, Harry Kane is at the top of the five European leagues, with 23 goals from 61 shots on goals in 26 games. [FiveThirtyEight]

As of the end of competition on Wednesday, players from the Netherlands have won 121 medals of which 42 were gold in the Winter Olympics. Of those, 95.4 percent of the golds and 94.2 percent of the total medals were in the sport of speedskating, making them the top one-trick nation in the games. [FiveThirtyEight]

Americans Chloe Kim and Arielle Gold medaled in the halfpipe snowboarding competition, with the seventeen year old phenom Kim taking a gold medal and Gold, who suffered a freak injury in Sochi, dislocating her shoulder on the flukey halfpipe at that games, taking third place. [The Washington Post]

Two of the best teams in the world, Canada and the United States, had a tumultuous first game in women’s hockey at the Olympics, with Canada’s 2-1 victory meaning they clinch the top seed in pool play. The two teams could very well face off against one another in next week’s final. Meanwhile, Team USA stomped the Olympic Athletes from Russia, with Jocelyne Lamoureaux scoring two goals in six seconds, an Olympic record. [ESPN]

Meanwhile, the U.S. men lost 3-2 to Slovenia in overtime after coughing up a 2-0 lead heading into the third period. The good news is that that game just helped to figure out the seeding for the knockout rounds, but that concludes our good news regarding the men’s U.S. hockey team for the time being. [Deadspin]

About six percent of Olympic athletes do not actually live in the nations they represent, which adds up to an estimated total of 178. Of those 178, at least 37 of them are Americans playing for other teams. Typically these folks have either dual citizenship or have fast-tracked naturalization in their chosen nation. [ESPN]

Big Number

29.6 percent

That’s the percentage of alpine ski race runs that are unfinished. While skeleton certainly looks like it’s designed for people to wipe out all the time, only 0.6 percent of races end in DQs. [FiveThirtyEight]

Leaks from Slack:

natesilver:

wow BIG curling comeback for the USAwe were down 6-1 and now its 6-6against Italy

walt:

DO YOU BELIEVE IN MIRACLES

linda.tutovan:

yay curling

walt:

[i do not]

tchow:

italy just hit a great shot

neil:

OMG you guys are watching too???We’re watching in the alcoveThis match has been crazy3+ points in almost every end, multiple steals

galen:

the USA outfits are cute

neil:

:us:

Predictions

NBA

Oh, and don’t forget

The word leaked out Wednesday afternoon that Willard Mitt Romney (it’s important to print his full name once in a while) would be imminently announcing a run for one of Utah’s U.S. Senate seats. While Romney chose to delay his campaign rollout after a mass shooting at a high school in Florida, the announcement is still expected to come within days. He’ll be seeking to fill a seat soon to be left vacant by a retiring Orrin Hatch.

Romney is up big in early polls of Utah’s U.S. Senate race

Pollster

Poll dates

Jenny Wilson

Mitt Romney

Dan Jones

Jan. 15-18, 2018

19%

64%

Dan Jones

Nov. 16-21, 2017

21

72

Dan Jones

Aug. 30-Sept. 5, 2017

26

64

In a January poll — conducted by Dan Jones for the Salt Lake Tribune and the University of Utah — even 18 percent of Utah Democrats said they would support Romney, who was the Republican Party’s 2012 presidential nominee. And in a Politico/Morning Consult poll from the same month, a plurality (40 percent) of registered voters nationwide thought that he should run for the seat.

While Romney served as governor of Massachusetts and was born in Michigan (where his father was governor), his Utah ties are deep. He was brought in to help salvage the 2002 Salt Lake City Olympics following a scandal, and he is perhaps America’s most prominent Mormon — Utah is the center of Mormon life and around 60 percent of Utahns belong to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints. He also resumed buying real estate in Utah in 2013 (he previously owned a home in the state but he sold it before his 2012 run), and one Utah friend told the Washington Post in 2015, “He feels very at home here.”

Now, could anything get in Romney’s way? There are some possibilities.

Despite how Romney himself might feel about Utah, some doubt his connection to the state. Utah’s GOP chair let it rip on Romey in an interview this week. “I think he’s keeping out candidates that I think would be a better fit for Utah because, let’s face it, Mitt Romney doesn’t live here, his kids weren’t born here, he doesn’t shop here,” Rob Anderson said.

Expect to see more “he’s not a Utahn” arguments from Romney’s opponents.

Anderson later apologized, but his dissent speaks to another dynamic that has the potential to derail Romney if the race goes national. Anderson was an early Trump supporter — his wife served as Trump’s Utah communications director — and Romney has a famously fraught relationship with the president. In March 2016, at the height of the presidential primaries, Romney made a much-buzzed-about speech dismantling and denouncing nearly every part of Trump’s campaign and platform. After the election, Romney met Trump for dinner and participated in history’s most tortured photo-op with the president-elect at the New York restaurant Jean Georges; Romney did not get the secretary of state position he was apparently angling for (though 13 percent of people think he is the secretary of state, according to Pew). According to an Economist/YouGov poll from January, 38 percent of Republicans and 39 percent of Democrats think that Romney would oppose President Trump in the Senate. If the White House and pro-Trump super PACs choose to make hay of Romney’s history of digs against Trump, the race could get tighter.

Still, Trump did relatively poorly in Utah, winning only 45 percent of the vote in 2016, compared to Romney’s 73 percent in 2012 and John McCain’s 62 percent in 2008. Indeed, Utah is an outlier in the sense that it is ruby red but has also given Trump relatively tepid marks so far. Here’s Gallup’s 2017 numbers showing what percentage of each state’s residents identify as Republican compared to what percentage approve of the job Trump is doing:

The race could also get more interesting if a pro-Trump candidate chooses to run in Utah. That scenario seems unlikely, given the strength of Romney’s numbers. But not so long ago, Steve Bannon and his allies were proclaiming that they’d primary every establishment Republican to kingdom come.

In a typical year, the NBA’s All-Star break offers the league’s most dysfunctional contenders a chance to reset, take inventory and right what ails them heading into the final stretch before the playoffs. This season, thanks to Cleveland’s moves at the trade deadline, the post-All-Star watch likely will fall to the Oklahoma City Thunder and how it weathers the loss of Andre Roberson, the beating heart of its defense.

After an offseason that included acquiring Paul George and Carmelo Anthony to combine with reigning MVP Russell Westbrook, the Thunder expected to compete at the highest levels. It hasn’t worked out that way. The team is 33-26 at the break and has lost six of its last nine games. There are all manner of reasons for this, from the obvious difficulties of integrating three high-usage stars to the decline of key players on an already-thin squad. (Offseason acquisition Patrick Patterson, who was a reliable stretch 4 for years in Toronto, has disappointed and tanked the offense while he’s been on the court.) Despite all that, the team seemed to have figured something out by January, when it ran off eight straight wins on the strength of its defense and a newly thriving offense. But late in that stretch, Roberson went down with a ruptured patellar tendon. He was lost for the season, and the Thunder had a whole new sort of crisis.

Roberson is a singular player in the NBA. He is one of the best perimeter defenders in the league, and at 6-foot-7, he has the size and quickness to guard four positions. Roberson’s effect on the Thunder defense is tremendous. He can switch practically any matchup, cover opposing stars and not only challenge their shots but also dissuade them from even attempting them. His defensive Real Plus-Minus — a stat that heavily favors big men — ranks fourth in the league. Overall, the defense was 12.5 points worse per 100 possessions when he left the floor. His effect doesn’t grade out at quite the same level of Golden State’s Draymond Green or Utah’s Rudy Gobert, but he just about maximizes the impact a perimeter defender can have on a game.

Or as Westbrook put it: “I think people outside our building, people across the world always complained about different things Andre didn’t do instead of embracing all the great things he did do. I’ve always embraced Andre and I was always very, very happy he was on my team because of things he did on both sides of the ball. Setting screens, cutting, running the floor. A lot of things that you can’t teach.”

Those “things Andre didn’t do,” of course, refer to Roberson being one of the worst regular offensive players in the league. Roberson is a notoriously inept and unwilling shooter. He is shooting 22 percent from the 3-point line this season on a diet of wide-open shots the opposing defense is thrilled to see him take. And yet, his overall effect on the offense doesn’t seem to have been as dire as advertised.

Since Roberson went out, Oklahoma City’s defensive rating has been 112.3, which would rank 27th in the league, ahead of only the Cleveland Cavaliers, Sacramento Kings and Phoenix Suns. That’s extreme though not unexpected with Roberson no longer there to cover for weaker defenders like Westbrook or Anthony. But here’s the kick in the head: The team’s offensive ratings has barely budged despite losing one of the worst offensive players in the league, going from 110.9 before Roberson’s injury to 111.8 after it. This is much harder to explain.

Roberson didn’t simply deprive his offense of a player who could do a better job of shooting, passing or dribbling. He shrank the court, allowing defenders to roam guilt-free, to harass ballhandlers and make life difficult for anyone establishing post position or running around off-ball screens.

So clearly the team would be expected to show more improvement than it has in his absence. But while the overall offense has been flat, the individual stars have thrived with Roberson out. With Roberson on the floor, the Thunder pick and roll barely worked at all, producing just 87 points per 100 chances, according to data from Second Spectrum. It didn’t much matter if it was Westbrook handling the ball (90 points per 100 chances), George (73), Raymond Felton (91) or Carmelo Anthony (94). Without Roberson there, the team’s pick-and-roll points jump to 95. Westbrook and George see especially large jumps without Roberson, landing at 100 and 91 points per 100 chances created on the pick and roll, respectively.

It gets stranger: George produced only 77 points per 100 chances on drives with Roberson on the floor; without him, that shot up to 96 — on a significant number of shots. Westbrook, too, goes from 98 points per 100 chances to 105, or the difference between Ish Smith and Victor Oladipo this season. And while Roberson didn’t actually affect the team’s effective field goal percentage overall, both Westbrook and George suffered large drop-offs in their shooting numbers when they shared the court with him.

But the Thunder have yet to capitalize on the additional space available with Roberson out. Westbrook has played well in some ways, creating at James Harden/Chris Paul levels on the pick and roll, and poorly in others, shooting just 43 percent from the field and 18 percent from the three in the games since Roberson’s injury. George has been hot from the three — he’s hit at least five 3-pointers in four consecutive games — and has averaged 29.6 points on a 62 effective field goal percentage through those 10 games. But Anthony has gone absolutely dormant, and both he and Westbrook missed two games to injury.

There’s plenty to be encouraged by over these past few games. George looks like a different player without Roberson, and all may be right if he and Westbrook are both firing at close to optimal levels by the playoffs. Further, second-year shooter Alex Abrines, seeing increased minutes with Roberson out, has run hot and cold, shooting 35 percent on threes overall since the injury. That should improve over time.

But even so, the offense taking a dip despite subtracting a guy who may be the single worst offensive player who’s actually allowed to play s troubling, and Oklahoma City doesn’t have an obvious source of those unteachable qualities Westbrook mentioned — the cutting, the running, the screens. The Thunder’s stars may finally have the room to operate as stars, but its problems are now ones not solved easily by star power.

At the Olympics in South Korea, highly populated countries such as the U.S. can contend in a broad range of sports, including skiing, hockey, skating and more. But smaller countries have a harder time producing world-class athletes in so many disciplines, so they often concentrate on just a few. Then there’s the Netherlands, which owns one event alone: speedskating.

Through the end of competition Wednesday (South Korea time) at the Pyeongchang Games, 40 of the 42 gold medals Dutch competitors have won in any Winter Olympics had come in speedskating — not to be confused with speedskating’s more exciting half-brother, short-track speed skating, which the Olympics count as a separate discipline. Just seven of the nation’s 121 total Winter medals came in a sport other than speedskating, a measly 5.8 percent. At the previous Winter Olympics in 2014, the Dutch claimed 24 medals: 23 in speedskating and one, a bronze, in short track skating. Eight of their medals were gold.

In sports, a country’s dominance often fades — look at Romania in Olympic gymnastics or U.S. men in tennis Grand Slams. But Dutch speedskaters have sustained their superiority. In the 2010 Olympics, they won eight medals: seven in speedskating and one, a gold, in snowboarding. They won nine in 2006, all in speedskating. So far this Olympics, they’ve already won nine speedskating medals,19 including five golds. The most impressive Dutch medal so far in these games: a third consecutive gold in the 5,000 meter race for Sven Kramer, who is 31 years old. He is the first man to win three straight golds in the same Olympic speedskating event. He won this year’s race by nearly two seconds.

The Dutch do one thing very, very well

The countries that have won the largest share of their medals in one sport at the Winter Olympics

IN Sport

ALL EVENTS

Share of

Country

Sport

Gold

Total

Golds

TOTAL

Golds

Total

Netherlands

Speedskating

40

114

42

121

95.4%

94.2%

Croatia

Alpine skiing

4

10

4

11

100.0

90.9

South Korea

Short track

22

43

27

54

81.5

79.6

China

Short track

9

30

12

53

75.0

56.6

Austria

Alpine skiing

35

115

61

221

57.4

52.0

Sweden

Cross-country ski

31

76

55

153

56.4

49.7

Finland

Cross-country ski

20

77

43

164

46.5

47.0

Great Britain

Figure skating

5

15

11

33

45.5

45.5

Switzerland

Alpine skiing

20

59

50

139

40.0

42.5

France

Alpine skiing

15

48

33

115

45.5

41.7

Among countries that won at least 10 medals in a single sport. Through Feb. 14, 2018 (South Korea time).

Source: Sports-Reference.com

Things weren’t always this way. Looking at all the medals ever given out in speedskating, the Dutch have captured 21 percent. This is impressive, but it’s short of other countries’ performances in other sports: Canada has won 31 percent of all curling medals, and the U.S. has won 29 percent of all snowboarding medals, for instance. But much of this has to do with the fact that speedskating has a long history at the Olympics, and the Netherlands has only reached its current level of dominance relatively recently. The Dutch won 13.1 percent of all speedskating medals between 1924 and the 1994 Olympics in Lillehammer, Norway, and all of those came after 1952. But since the 1998 Games in Nagano, Japan, the Netherlands has captured 36.6 percent of all podium spots.20

The Dutch dominance is so complete that it inspires wacky theories. NBC’s Katie Couric was mocked for her recent statement that the Dutch are so good because they have a longstanding tradition of skating from place to place on frozen canals. The problem: Those canals freeze only a few times a year, if at all, and when people skate on them, it’s for recreation. Dutch skeedskaters are also rumored to have an ideal body type for the sport, but while the country’s racers are often tall, so are many of their opponents from other countries. Nor do the Dutch use a proprietary method to glide past other competitors: While many members of the team have spectacular form, which includes bending low and skating with force and precision, the technique isn’t a secret.

The real cause, more than anything else, is dedication. Starting in childhood, Dutch skaters train with excellent instructors. The Dutch team’s skating equipment is the best in the world, too. For the Olympics in 2014, officials from the host city of Sochi went to the Netherlands to learn how to build a top-of-the-line racing rink. By the time they are ready to compete, Dutch stars have been skating in ideal conditions and learning how to peak in time for the biggest races.

The ultimate proof of a country’s prowess in an Olympic event is sweeping all three medals. The Netherlands managed it earlier this week, when Dutch women took gold, silver and bronze in a 3,000 meter speedskating race. In another race, the 31-year-old Ireen Wust won her fifth career gold medal and 10th overall medal, a speedskating record. That victory was a surprise, as the silver medalist, Miho Takagi of Japan, was a strong favorite. Wust is the first Dutch athlete to win five gold medals.

The only champions who beat out the Dutch in terms of winning all their medals in a single sport in either the Winter or Summer Games21 are Ethiopia and Jamaica, who excel in track and field races. Ethiopia has 53 summer medals, all of them in track and field. Jamaica, famous for the record-holding sprinter Usain Bolt, has won 98.7 percent of its medals in track. The Dutch are next on the list, at 94.2 percent.

The Summer Games’ one-sport specialists

The countries that have won the largest share of their Summer Olympic medals in one sport

Medals

Country

Sport

In sport

Total

share of total

Ethiopia

Track & Field

53

53

100.0%

Jamaica

Track & Field

77

78

98.7

Kenya

Track & Field

93

100

93.0

Bahamas

Track & Field

12

14

85.7

Morocco

Track & Field

19

23

82.6

Trinidad and Tobago

Track & Field

15

19

79.0

Turkey

Wrestling

63

95

66.3

Slovakia

Canoeing

18

28

64.3

Indonesia

Badminton

19

30

63.3

Iran

Wrestling

43

68

63.2

Among countries that won at least 10 medals in a single sport

Source: Sports-Reference.com

So, will the Dutch team’s rule ever end? This seems impossible now, especially given the relatively low levels of attention the sport gets in powerful countries like the U.S. But you never know. As the U.S. and many other countries have shown, Olympic dominance usually doesn’t last forever. Enjoy it, those of you from the Netherlands, while you can.

Welcome to The Lab, FiveThirtyEight’s basketball podcast. On this week’s show (Feb. 15, 2018), FiveThirtyEight editor-in-chief Nate Silver is back to help break down the latest in the NBA with Neil and Kyle. First, the Utah Jazz are on an 11-game winning streak. The crew takes a look at what’s going right for the Jazz — and how it might come to a halt. Next, the All-Star Game is nearly here, and The Lab’s members are taking it to the lab: keeping what they like, cutting what they don’t and throwing out some crazy ideas (8-year-olds choosing teams! one-on-ones!) that might make watching it more enjoyable. Plus, a small-sample-size segment on the new Cleveland Cavaliers.

7 identities

The chief counsel for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement in Seattle was charged with stealing the identities of seven immigrants over a four-year period, according to an indictment filed this week. The official faces one count of wire fraud and one count of aggravated identity theft for targeting people while their ICE cases were being processed. [BuzzFeed]

26 percent

In light of recent abuse allegations against Rob Porter, a former member of President Trump’s administration, a Huffington Post/YouGov poll found strikingly different attitudes by gender and partisanship when it came to domestic violence. Domestic abuse was considered a “very serious” problem in the U.S. by 78 percent of female Hillary Clinton voters and 66 percent of male Clinton voters. In contrast, 50 percent of women who voted for Trump called it “very serious,” along with 26 percent of male Trump voters. [The Huffington Post]

7,438 Tesla Model 3’s

Approximate number of Model 3 vehicles — the rare electric car that’s actually affordable — manufactured by Tesla since the fall of 2017. That’s a rate of about 1,025 per week, according to a clever estimate (as of Thursday morning) from Bloomberg that analyzed the Vehicle Identification Numbers (VINs) posted to the internet. [Bloomberg]

Over 200,000 tweets

While Twitter would prefer they get memory holed, NBC News published more than 200,000 tweets on Wednesday from Russia-linked accounts tied to 2016 election interference. [NBC News]

$300 million

Ryan Murphy — producer behind “Glee,” “American Crime Story,” “American Horror Story” and more — has signed a 5-year development deal with Netflix worth as much as $300 million. Murphy is leaving 21st Century Fox, where he’s on contract until this summer. [The New York Times]

$13.15 trillion

Total U.S. household debt hit an all-time high of $13.15 trillion at the end of 2017. That’s up $193 billion from the previous quarter. Mortgage debt is at $8.88 trillion, up $139 billion. [CNBC]

People are always trying to pinpoint the moment that the free-wheeling, summer-of-love spirit of the 1960s died. For those who look back on the era fondly, maybe it faded away after Woodstock. For the pessimists, it’s more like the Manson Family murders and Altamont. It’s futile, of course, but I’ve always liked the idea of trying to pinpoint when an era begins or ends. It’s a nice, digestible way for the brain — soft and squishy with emotion and memory — to bookend vast swaths of history.

A year into this president’s first term, I’ve been trying to answer a similar question about the era of Donald Trump: When was America’s emotional table set for his election? Trump has been driving the American political conversation in one way or another for a while now, ever since he floated, tanned and confident, down an escalator to the strains of Neil Young, like an aging mallrat. But I think the real emotional buildup to Trump started before he appeared on that escalator. I think it starts with a year: 2014.

Donald Trump at the groundbreaking of the Trump International Hotel in Washington, D.C., on July 23, 2014.

Kris Connor / Getty Images

People have offered plenty of theories for why Trump won — racial resentment, economic anxiety, hyper-partisanship — but many of those things have attracted voters to other candidates in other years, candidates who were far less successful than Trump. The difference in 2016 seemed to be that Trump turned the campaign into something deeply personal for all Americans, a referendum on our national self-worth — were we already great or were we in need of great improvement? Trump disgorged sentiments of fear, loathing and hope in a way wholly unfamiliar to our sober, straight-laced politics. He was a one-man ayahuasca brew tripping Americans the hell out. It was a bad trip for some, clarifying for others.

Of course, the results of the 2016 election can’t be traced back to a single year. History elides, one event melts into the next, one year builds on the last — the sentiments of people growing and changing year over year. But a series of events can also surface strong feelings in a group of people and feed the idea that a change is afoot, that Americans’ self-presumed exceptionalism has atrophied.

Consider that all this happened in 2014: ISIS executions of American captives; the killings of Eric Garner, Michael Brown and Tamir Rice by police and the ensuing protests; the annexation of Crimea by Russia; the downing of a civilian airliner by Russia; and a wave of unaccompanied minors from Central America crossing the border illegally in what then-President Obama called “an urgent humanitarian situation.”

Numbers can’t prove that 2014 was a pivotal year for the Trumpian political era to come, but they can show it was a year when Americans’ institutional trust bottomed out, something that would come into play in 2016. A few days after the election, I wrote about the erosion of trust in American institutions over the past decade. There was a link, I wrote then, between our loss of trust and electing a man who promised to start a new American order. And in 2014, overall trust in American institutions, which started falling in the mid-2000s, hit 31 percent — its lowest point since Gallup starting tracking the metric in 1993.

But what does it mean to lose trust in things so abstract as institutions? While I can’t speak for the good people who answered Gallup’s surveys, I’m guessing that what lay behind their anemic faith was a sense that all was not well, or at least all was not being handled well.

Marchers in Los Angeles on Dec. 6, 2014, protest the decision in New York not to indict a police officer involved in the chokehold death of Eric Garner.

David McNew / GETTY IMAGES

Trump’s ultimately brilliant political intuition was to burrow deep into this recess of the American mind and to reflect back the sense of creeping disarray. He capitalized on racial and economic fears, but his campaign kickoff proclamation that “the American dream is dead” didn’t just resonate with the people who might have voted for populist and nativist campaigns of the past. Trump’s appeal was broad, resonating with the relatively well-off and the well-educated. The Americaneconomy was doing fine (for the most part), but Trump tapped into Americans’ worry that their children would be worse offwhile navigating the swiftly shifting 21st-century economy and the potential terrorist threats lurking in subways, schools and places of business. He flipped Republican voters’ views on free trade upside down, seemingly proving that policy didn’t have to matter quite so much as the message did — political scientists might call his voters “symbolically conservative” but “operationally liberal.” “I alone can fix it,” Trump told the cheering crowd at the Republican National Convention. The “it” he was referring to was “the system.” It was a concrete offer to plug a gaping hole, though the plan of how to go about it was vague.

Americans’ cratering faith was most apparent in numbers tracking trust in the government. Confidence in the presidency fell more than 20 points between 2009 and 2014. Since 1991, when Gallup started regularly tracking numbers on the presidency, the numbers were lower in 2014 than at any time except 2007 and 2008. Congress and the Supreme Court were also at all-time lows,22 and trust in the police was at 53 percent, down 4 points from the previous year. It would slide further in 2015.

Police shootings of black Americans no doubt profoundly influenced Americans’ views on race relations, a metric tracked sporadically by Gallup since 2001. In 2013, 70 percent of Americans overall thought that race relations were very good or somewhat good, but by the next time Gallup asked the question, in 2015, only 47 percent thought so. That Black Lives Matter sparked consistent protests about the treatment of black Americans over these years can be no coincidence. Backlash to the movement would later find its form in a celebration of police and the idea of law and order, centerpieces of Trump’s campaign and presidency.

The rise of ISIS throughout 2014 tracked with a rising fear of terrorism among Americans during the period between 2013 and 2015, when Gallup asked people to rate their worry that someone in their family would become a victim of terrorism. In 2013, 40 percent were very or somewhat worried by the prospect, and by 2015, that number had risen to around 50 percent. ISIS’s viral videos of Westerners’ beheadings heralded a new age of brutal terrorist tactics and a facility with social media that spoke to young potential recruits. Trump’s campaign would later call for a ban on Muslims coming into the country, after an ISIS-inspired attack in San Bernardino, California, in 2015.

John and Diane Foley talk to reporters outside their home in Rochester, New Hampshire, on Aug. 20, 2014, a day after the release of a video showing the beheading of their son, James Foley, at the hands of ISIS.

Jim Cole / AP

Racial injustice and a new threat of terrorism were not the only stirrings in 2014. Russian bellicosity shocked Americans who’d grown used to a foolish-seeming Putin on a horse — favorable views of the country fell by 10 points between February 2014, a month before the invasion of Crimea, and February 2015. And the online harassment and doxing of Gamergate seems in hindsight to have been only a prelude to the dark side of social media in the 2016 campaign.

Trying to pin 2014 as the start of a new era is a subjective exercise, perhaps a fool’s errand. But if politics is driven by emotion and memory, so in this case is its hindsight analysis. 2014 was in my book an annus horribilis, a blur of mortality. Perhaps if Gallup had called me, I’d have told them I’d lost trust.

In June 2014, someone I knew well was murdered. In July, Eric Garner died on Staten Island, in the city where I’d just moved. In August, I remember sitting on a fluorescent-lit subway car and reading about the beheading of a journalist named James Foley by some group called ISIS. A year later, I’d have to watch his beheading video and speak with his family for a magazine story I fact-checked about the vain attempts to save him and other Americans. Michael Brown was killed in August, too. September brought another ISIS beheading video. In October, a doctor in New York City was diagnosed with Ebola — a global terror of its own kind — and I found myself thinking uncontrollable thoughts about biohazards let loose on the subway. In November, Tamir Rice was killed in my hometown, and the midterm election gave the Republicans control of the U.S. Senate — though that’s only a blip in my memory. The emotions stirred by 2014 lingered longer with me than its discrete politics.

Perhaps that’s why the themes of fear and mortality that hovered over the 2016 election made some sense to me with 2014 in the rearview mirror. It’s hard to tell how long it takes for emotional responses like mine to get into the political bloodstream of a country, but when pricked by the right needle, America’s primal worry and righteous anger bled out over an election.

On any given week during peak soccer season, FiveThirtyEight offers projections for dozens of club soccer matches across the globe. The sheer volume of matches taking place this time of year can be paralyzing. With that in mind, we’ve added a feature to our club soccer predictions that rates upcoming matches on their quality and importance. You can use this page to pick a few good ones to be sure not to miss.

This week’s biggest match — rated an overall 96 out of 100 — is today’s Champions League round of 16 first leg between Real Madrid and Paris Saint-Germain. This is a bit of a no-brainer — it features Neymar and Cristiano Ronaldo leading the second- and third-best teams in the world against each other in a high-stakes clash. But there are some other good matches to watch: Borussia Dortmund and Atalanta — two of the best eight remaining teams in the Europa League — play each other on Thursday in the round of 32. If we dig deeper, Empoli and Parma — two teams fighting for promotion and the league title at the top of a very tight Italian Serie B — play each other Saturday. And Manchester United plays Chelsea on Feb. 25 in the Premier League in what is a pivotal match for Champions League qualification.

Here’s how we calculate our match ratings:

Quality is simply a measure of how good the teams are. Specifically, it’s the harmonic mean of the two teams’ Soccer Power Index ratings. (We’re using the harmonic mean instead of merely averaging the two ratings because in lopsided matches it limits the impact of very high or low ratings, resulting in a more balanced number.) Because every team has an SPI rating between 0 and 100, our match quality stat also ranges from 0 to 100.

Importance is a measure of how much the outcome of the match will affect our forecast for how likely the two teams are to win the league, or be relegated or promoted, among other things. To calculate it, we generate probabilities conditional on each team winning the match and then find the difference between those two possible numbers.

We consider different factors depending on which league the match is being played in. For some leagues, our forecasts cover winning the league and qualifying for the Champions League, for example.

We take a weighted average of the change in each applicable factor and scale the result to between 0 and 100. All leagues are treated equally when calculating importance, so a match to decide the winner of the Swedish Allsvenskan would rate just as high as a match to decide the winner of the English Premier League.

The overall match rating is just the average of quality and importance.

The 2018 St. John’s Red Storm might go down as the most erratic team in men’s college basketball history. When they were losing, they couldn’t do anything right. But now that they’re winning, they’re taking down some of the most feared programs in the country. No team has ever rattled off a more impressive series of victories from a less likely place than the Johnnies did over the past week and change.

But let’s roll things back a bit. To start things off, coach Chris Mullin’s squad began the season 10-2 — tied for the program’s second-best start to a season in 32 years. Although most of those wins came against relatively weak opponents, the team was competitive late in each of its losses (to Missouri and Arizona State, both of whom rank among the top 40 in Ken Pomeroy’s power ratings). Coming off a season of progress in Mullin’s second year at the helm, things finally appeared to be looking up for the Storm in their quest to return to the NCAA tournament for the first time since 2015.

Then the wheels fell off. Starting with their first Big East game of the year, a loss to Providence three days after Christmas, the Johnnies proceeded to drop 11 straight games. Before the calendar could even flip to February, St. John’s had matched its in-conference loss total for all of last season. An early season-ending injury to sophomore guard Marcus LoVett, who’d finished second on the team in scoring last season, helped tank the offense,23 and the defense collapsed from 13th in Ken Pomeroy’s ratings to 41st over the span of a month.

After their 11th straight loss, a hard-fought 73-68 defeat against sixth-ranked Xavier, the Johnnies’ future looked even more bleak. Games against Duke, Villanova and Marquette were coming up, so there was little to suggest that the Red Storm would be able to pull their season out of its death spiral.

How unexpected was this sudden reversal? Our Elo power-rating data goes back to the 1949-50 season, and over that span there have been 1,207 streaks where a team won three games in a row against opponents who each had Elo ratings over 1750 — the mark of a good team.24 Of those 1,207 teams, none had a lower Elo at the start of their streak than St. John’s, who’d dropped to a 1511 rating at its nadir (which was a low point since Dec. 2016, and the program’s fifth-lowest rating in a season since 1964). Statistically speaking, the Johnnies might have been the least likely team in history to rattle off those three particular wins at that particular moment in time.

The Johnnies’ win streak came out of nowhere

Lowest Elo ratings for teams just before starting a three-game win streak against opponents who each had at least a 1750 Elo rating, 1950-2018

Win No. 1

Win No. 2

Win No. 3

Season

Team

Opponent

Elo

Opponent

Elo

Opponent

Elo

Starting Elo

2018

St. John’s

Duke

1977

Villanova

2117

Marquette

1761

1511

2017

Nebraska

Indiana

1910

Maryland

1840

Iowa

1767

1577

2007

Auburn

Arkansas

1770

Alabama

1761

LSU

1767

1577

1977

Virginia

Maryland

1843

W. Forest

1828

Clemson

1890

1583

1985

Miss. St.

Alabama

1827

LSU

1831

Georgia

1767

1586

2008

Georgia*

Ole Miss

1758

Kentucky

1788

Miss. St.

1893

1599

2008

Okla. St.

Baylor

1767

Tex. A&M

1928

Kansas

2051

1607

1997

Missouri

Nebraska

1764

Texas

1810

Oklahoma

1868

1619

2000

Marquette

Depaul

1768

Louisville

1800

Charlotte

1767

1621

1970

W. Forest

UNC

1835

Davidson

1751

UNC

1827

1627

*Georgia had two qualifying streaks in 2007-08, which overlapped. We included only the streak with the lowest starting rating.

Source: ESPN, Sports-Reference.com

The Johnnies’ win streak came out of nowhere

Lowest Elo ratings for teams just before starting a three-game win streak against opponents who each had at least a 1750 Elo rating, 1950-2018

Win

Season

Team

No. 1

No. 2

No. 3

Starting Elo

2018

St. John’s

Duke

Villanova

Marquette

1511

2017

Nebraska

Indiana

Maryland

Iowa

1577

2007

Auburn

Arkansas

Alabama

LSU

1577

1977

Virginia

Maryland

W. Forest

Clemson

1583

1985

Miss. St.

Alabama

LSU

Georgia

1586

2008

Georgia*

Ole Miss

Kentucky

Miss. St.

1599

2008

Okla. St.

Baylor

Tex. A&M

Kansas

1607

1997

Missouri

Nebraska

Texas

Oklahoma

1619

2000

Marquette

Depaul

Louisville

Charlotte

1621

1970

W. Forest

UNC

Davidson

UNC

1627

*Georgia had two qualifying streaks in 2007-08, which overlapped. We included only the streak with the lowest starting rating.

Source: ESPN, Sports-Reference.com

The victories over Duke and Villanova alone were historic. According to Elo, St. John’s was the lowest-rated team ever to knock off two teams with ratings over 1900 in back-to-back games, toppling a record that had previously been held by the 1957-58 Nebraska Cornhuskers (when the Huskers beat No. 4 Kansas and then No. 1 Kansas State). But unlike that Nebraska team, which lost the following game, the Red Storm tacked on another impressive win to bring their streak up to three in a row.

They’ll try to extend it to four straight on Wednesday night, against DePaul in Chicago — and according to Pomeroy’s projections, there’s a 49 percent chance that St. John’s will pull it off. If so, it would only add to one of the most up-and-down seasons the sport has ever seen. Even after three big wins, the Red Storm still aren’t on anybody’s NCAA tourney radar. In fact, with 13 losses already on the books, maybe the only sure way for St. John’s to get to the dance would be for them to win the Big East Tournament — possibly by knocking off Villanova again. But hey, stranger things have already happened.

Last fall, Lindsey Vonn, a gold-medal Olympian and the second winningest World Cup skier of all time,25repeated a request she’d made before: to race against men. U.S. Ski & Snowboard made a formal petition on her behalf to the International Ski Federation (FIS), which currently does not allow mixed-gender competitions.26 The FIS won’t rule on the petition until spring at the earliest, so as Vonn competes in Pyeongchang this weekend, she won’t know if she will ever get a chance to race against her male peers.27

Vonn’s quest made us wonder: What would the Olympics look like if men and women skied against each other? We got results for four Alpine events in the Winter Olympics28 going back to 1948 and looked at the median speed29 for competitors in the men’s and women’s events in each year.30

In slalom, giant slalom and the super-G, women’s and men’s performances seem to vary in comparison to each other. However, in downhill, the event that most emphasizes speed rather than making turns, the men consistently run ahead of the women — though female downhill skiers today are faster in general than the men who competed in the late 1970s and earlier.

But these comparisons hide a key difference between the men’s and women’s competitions: namely, the courses themselves. Men and women rarely race on the same courses, which are set according to different guidelines, with men’s courses requiring a greater change in elevation. Courses also vary in their steepness, but there has not been a marked difference in the average gradient of men’s and women’s courses. This means that men’s courses, which tend to have the same gradient as women’s but a greater vertical change, are usually longer than women’s. In other Winter Olympic sports where events are defined by their lengths, such as cross-country skiing and biathlon, the women’s races are also almost always significantly shorter.31

So here’s another question: Is there any reason for women’s Alpine courses to be shorter? For example, do women go faster on shorter courses, either relative to themselves or to men? (Though that in itself would not be a reason that women’s courses had to be shorter but might give some explanation as to why they are.) To investigate, we plotted average speed versus course length for the winning female competitor in each event for every year.

As women have gotten faster, they have also been racing longer distances. It seems that distance is not a limiting factor for female skiers. And yet, while the range of women’s speeds is comparable to that of men’s — and even in some events, such as super-G, women have the fastest average speeds in our dataset — in no event have women raced on the longest courses (though in many cases they raced the same distance or greater than men did in other Olympic years).

Apart from any questions of inequality, this feature of Alpine skiing makes comparing men’s and women’s performances very difficult. Distance may, in fact, affect average speeds, and requiring separate courses also means that other factors, like gate placement and steepness, will be different for men’s and women’s races.

The separation of genders in Alpine skiing, combined with the fact that women are usually asked to do less than men, implies that if men and women were in head-to-head competition, women would never have a shot at gold.32 But we simply don’t know for sure if that is true — with all the differences between men’s and women’s races, the data can’t really tell us. Vonn herself has expressed doubts about how she would perform directly against men, telling the Denver Post, “I know I’m not going to win.”

“But,” she said, “I would like to at least have the opportunity to try.”

FiveThirtyEight, sometimes referred to as 538, is a website that focuses on opinion poll analysis, politics, economics, and sports blogging. The website, which takes its name from the number of electors in the United States electoral college,[538 1] was founded on March 7, 2008, as a polling aggregation website with a blog created by analyst Nate Silver. In August 2010, the blog became a licensed feature of The New York Times online. It was renamed FiveThirtyEight: Nate Silver's Political Calculus. In July 2013, ESPN announced that it would become the owner of the FiveThirtyEight brand and site, and Silver was appointed as editor-in-chief.[3] The ESPN-owned FiveThirtyEight began publication on March 17, 2014. In the ESPN era, the FiveThirtyEight blog has covered a broad spectrum of subjects including politics, sports, science, economics, and popular culture.

Since the 2008 election, the site has published articles – typically creating or analyzing statistical information – on a wide variety of topics in current politics and political news. These included a monthly update on the prospects for turnover in the U.S. Senate; federal economic policies; Congressional support for legislation; public support for health care reform, global warming legislation, LGBT rights; elections around the world; marijuana legalization; and numerous other topics. The site and its founder are best known for election forecasts, including the 2012 presidential election in which FiveThirtyEight correctly predicted the vote winner of all 50 states. On the eve of the 2016 election their forecast gave Hillary Clinton a 71% chance of winning and Donald Trump a 29% chance.[6]

During its first five and a half years FiveThirtyEight won numerous awards – both when it was an independent blog and when it was published by The New York Times. These included "Bloggie" Awards for "Best Political Coverage" in 2008 and "Best Weblog about Politics" in 2009, as well as "Webbies" for "Best Political Blog" in 2012 and 2013. In 2016, while under the ownership of ESPN, FiveThirtyEight won the "Data Journalism Website of the Year" award from the Paris, France based Global Editors Network.

The website's logo depicts a fox, in reference to a phrase attributed to Archilochus: "The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing."[538 2]

Genesis and history

When Silver started FiveThirtyEight.com in early March 2008, he published under the name "Poblano", the same name that he had used since November 2007 when he began publishing a diary on the political blogDaily Kos.[7] Writing as Poblano on Daily Kos, he had gained a following, especially for his primary election forecast on Super Tuesday, February 5, 2008.[8][9] From that primary election day, which included contests in 24 states plus American Samoa, "Poblano" predicted that Barack Obama would come away with 859 delegates, and Hillary Clinton 829; in the final contests, Obama won 847 delegates and Clinton 834. Based on this result, New York Timesop-ed columnist William Kristol wrote: "And an interesting regression analysis at the Daily Kos Web site (poblano.dailykos.com) of the determinants of the Democratic vote so far, applied to the demographics of the Ohio electorate, suggests that Obama has a better chance than is generally realized in Ohio".[10]

FiveThirtyEight.com gained further national attention for beating out most pollsters' projections in the North Carolina and Indiana Democratic party primaries on May 6, 2008. As Mark Blumenthal wrote in National Journal, "Over the last week, an anonymous blogger who writes under the pseudonym Poblano did something bold on his blog, FiveThirtyEight.com. He posted predictions for the upcoming primaries based not on polling data, but on a statistical model driven mostly by demographic and past vote data.... Critics scoffed. Most of the public polls pointed to a close race in North Carolina.... But a funny thing happened. The model got it right".[11] Silver relied on demographic data and on the history of voting in other states during the 2008 Democratic primary elections. "I think it is interesting and, in a lot of ways, I'm not surprised that his predictions came closer to the result than the pollsters did", said Brian F. Schaffner, research director of American University's Center for Congressional and Presidential Studies.[12]

On May 30, 2008, Silver revealed his true identity for the first time to his FiveThirtyEight.com readers.[538 3] After that date, he published just four more diaries on Daily Kos.[7]

As the primary season was coming to an end, Silver began to build a model for the general election race. This model, too, relied in part on demographic information but mainly involved a complex method of aggregating polling results. In 2008, Rasmussen Reports had an apparently short-term partnership with FiveThirtyEight.com in order to include this unique methodology for generating poll averages in their "Balance of Power Calculator".[13] At the same time, FiveThirtyEight.com's daily "Today's Polls" column began to be mirrored on "The Plank," a blog published by The New Republic.[14]

By early October 2008, FiveThirtyEight.com approached 2.5 million visitors per week, while averaging approximately 400,000 per weekday.[538 4] During October 2008 the site received 3.63 million unique visitors, 20.57 million site visits, and 32.18 million page views.[538 5] On Election Day, November 4, 2008, the site had nearly 5 million page views.[15]

On June 3, 2010, Silver announced that in early August the blog would be "relaunched under a NYTimes.com domain".[538 6][16][17] The transition took place on August 25, 2010, with the publication of Silver's first FiveThirtyEight blog article online in The New York Times.[538 7]

In July 2013, it was revealed that Silver and his FiveThirtyEight blog would depart The New York Times and join ESPN.[18] In its announcement of its acquisition of FiveThirtyEight, ESPN reported that "Silver will serve as the editor-in-chief of the site and will build a team of journalists, editors, analysts and contributors in the coming months. Much like Grantland, which ESPN launched in 2011, the site will retain an independent brand sensibility and editorial point-of-view, while interfacing with other websites in the ESPN and Disney families. The site will return to its original URL, www.FiveThirtyEight.com".[19]

According to Silver, the focus of FiveThirtyEight in its ESPN phase would broaden: "People also think it’s going to be a sports site with a little politics thrown in, or it’s going to be a politics site with sports thrown in.... But we take our science and economics and lifestyle coverage very seriously.... It’s a data journalism site. Politics is one topic that sometimes data journalism is good at covering. It’s certainly good with presidential elections. But we don’t really see politics as how the site is going to grow".[20]

FiveThirtyEight launched its ESPN webpage on March 17, 2014. The lead story by Nate Silver explained that "FiveThirtyEight is a data journalism organization.... We’ve expanded our staff from two full-time journalists to 20 and counting. Few of them will focus on politics exclusively; instead, our coverage will span five major subject areas – politics, economics, science, life and sports. Our team also has a broad set of skills and experience in methods that fall under the rubric of data journalism. These include statistical analysis, but also data visualization, computer programming and data-literate reporting. So in addition to written stories, we’ll have interactive graphics and features".[538 2]

2008 U.S. elections

Methods

One unique aspect of the site is Silver's efforts to rank pollsters by accuracy, weight their polls accordingly, and then supplement those polls with his own electoral projections based on demographics and prior voting patterns. "I did think there was room for a more sophisticated way of handling these things," Silver said.[12][21]

At base Silver's method is similar to other analysts' approaches to taking advantage of the multiple polls that are conducted within each state: he averaged the polling results. But especially in the early months of the election season polling in many states is sparse and episodic. The "average" of polls over an extended period (perhaps several weeks) would not reveal the true state of voter preferences at the present time, nor provide an accurate forecast of the future. One approach to this problem was followed by Pollster.com: if enough polls were available, it computed a locally weighted moving average or LOESS.

However, while adopting such an approach in his own analysis, Silver reasoned that there was additional information available in polls from "similar" states that might help to fill the gaps in information about the trends in a given state. Accordingly, he adapted an approach that he had previously used in his baseball forecasting: using nearest neighbor analysis he first identified "most similar states" and then factored into his electoral projections for a given state the polling information from "similar states". He carried this approach one step further by also factoring national polling trends into the estimates for a given state. Thus, his projections were not simply based on the polling trends in a given state.

Furthermore, a basic intuition that Silver drew from his analysis of the 2008 Democratic party primary elections was that the voting history of a state or Congressional district provided clues to current voting. This is what allowed him to beat all the pollsters in his forecasts in the Democratic primaries in North Carolina and Indiana, for example.[11] Using such information allowed Silver to come up with estimates of the vote preferences even in states for which there were few if any polls. For his general election projections for each state, in addition to relying on the available polls in a given state and "similar states," Silver estimated a "538 regression" using historical voting information along with demographic characteristics of the states to create an estimate that he treated as a separate poll (equivalent to the actually available polls from that state). This approach helped to stabilize his projections, because if there were few if any polls in a given state, the state forecast was largely determined by the 538 regression estimate.

In July 2008, the site began to report regular updates of projections of 2008 U.S. Senate races. Special procedures were developed relying on both polls and demographic analysis. The projections were updated on a weekly basis.[538 9]

Final projections of 2008 elections

In the final update of his presidential forecast model at midday of November 4, 2008, Silver projected a popular vote victory by 6.1 percentage points for Barack Obama and electoral vote totals of 349 (based on a probabilistic projection) or 353 (based on fixed projections of each state).[538 10] Obama won with 365 electoral college votes. Silver's predictions matched the actual results everywhere except in Indiana and the 2nd congressional district of Nebraska, which awards an electoral vote separately from the rest of the state. His projected national popular vote differential was below the actual figure of 7.2 points.

The forecasts for the Senate proved to be correct for every race. But the near stalemate in Minnesota led to a recount that was settled only on June 30, 2009. In Alaska, after a protracted counting of ballots, on November 19 Republican incumbent Ted Stevens conceded the seat to Democrat Mark Begich, an outcome that Silver had forecast on election day.[22] And in Georgia, a run-off election on December 2 led to the re-election of Republican Saxby Chambliss, a result that was also consistent with Silver's original projection.

After the 2008 U.S. election

Focus

During the first two months after the election, no major innovations in content were introduced. A substantial percentage of the articles focused on Senatorial races: the runoff in Georgia, won by Saxby Chambliss; recounts of votes in Alaska (won by Mark Begich), and Minnesota (Al Franken vs. Norm Coleman); and the appointments of Senatorial replacements in Colorado, New York, and Illinois.

During the post-2008 election period Silver devoted attention to developing some tools for the analysis of forthcoming 2010 Congressional elections,[538 13][538 14] as well as discussing policy issues and the policy agenda for the Obama administration, especially economic policies.[538 15][538 16] He developed a list of 2010 Senate races in which he made monthly updates of predicted party turnover.[538 17]

Later, Silver adapted his methods to address a variety of issues of the day, including health care reform, climate change, unemployment, and popular support for same-sex marriage.[23] He wrote a series of columns investigating the credibility of polls by Georgia-based firm Strategic Vision, LLC. According to Silver's analysis, Strategic Vision's data displayed statistical anomalies that were inconsistent with random polling. Later, he uncovered indirect evidence that Strategic Vision may have gone as far as to fabricate the results of a citizenship survey taken by Oklahoma high school students.[24][538 18][538 19][538 20][538 21][538 22][25][a]FiveThirtyEight devoted more than a dozen articles to the Iranian presidential election in June 2009, assessing of the quality of the vote counting. International affairs columnist Renard Sexton began the series with an analysis of polling leading up to the election;[538 23] then posts by Silver, Andrew Gelman and Sexton analyzed the reported returns and political implications.[538 24]

FiveThirtyEight covered the November 3, 2009, elections in the United States in detail.[538 25][538 26]FiveThirtyEight writers Schaller, Gelman, and Silver also gave extensive coverage to the January 19, 2010 Massachusetts special election to the U.S. Senate. The "538 model" once again aggregated the disparate polls to correctly predict that the Republican Scott Brown would win.[538 27]

In spring of 2010, FiveThirtyEight turned a focus on the United Kingdom General Election scheduled for May 6, with a series of more than forty articles on the subject that culminated in projections of the number of seats that the three major parties were expected to win.[538 28] Following a number of preview posts in January,[538 29] and February,[538 30] Renard Sexton examined subjects such as the UK polling industry[538 31][538 32][538 33] and the 'surge' of the third-party Liberal Democrats,[538 34] while Silver, Sexton and Dan Berman[b] developed a seat projection model. The UK election was the first time the FiveThirtyEight team did an election night 'liveblog' of a non-US election.[538 35]

In April 2010, the Guardian Newspaper published Silver's predictions for the 2010 United Kingdom General Election. The majority of polling organisations in the UK use the concept of uniform swing to predict the outcome of elections. However, by applying his own methodology, Silver produced very different results, which suggested that a Conservative victory might have been the most likely outcome.[27] After a series of articles, including critiques and responses to other electoral analysts, his "final projection" was published on the eve of the election.[538 36] In the end, Silver's projections were off the mark, particularly compared with those of some other organizations, and Silver wrote a post mortem on his blog.[538 37] Silver examined the pitfalls of the forecasting process,[538 37] while Sexton discussed the final government agreement between the Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats.[538 38]

Controversy over transparency in pollster ratings

On June 6, 2010, FiveThirtyEight posted pollster rankings that updated and elaborated Silver's efforts from the 2008 election. Silver expanded the database to more than 4,700 election polls and developed a model for rating the polls that was more sophisticated than his original rankings.[538 39][28]

Silver responded on 538: "Where's the transparency? Well, it's here [citing his June 6 article], in an article that contains 4,807 words and 18 footnotes. Every detail of how the pollster ratings are calculated is explained. It's also here [referring to another article], in the form of Pollster Scorecards, a feature which we'll continue to roll out over the coming weeks for each of the major polling firms, and which will explain in some detail how we arrive at the particular rating that we did for each one".[538 40]

As for why the complete 538 polling database had not been released publicly, Silver responded: "The principal reason is because I don't know that I'm legally entitled to do so. The polling database was compiled from approximately eight or ten distinct data sources, which were disclosed in a comment which I posted shortly after the pollster ratings were released, and which are detailed again at the end of this article. These include some subscription services, and others from websites that are direct competitors of this one. Although polls contained in these databases are ultimately a matter of the public record and clearly we feel as though we have every right to use them for research purposes, I don't know what rights we might have to re-publish their data in full".

Subsequently, on June 11, Mark Blumenthal also commented on the question of transparency in an article in the National Journal titled "Transparency In Rating: Nate Silver's Impressive Ranking Of Pollsters' Accuracy Is Less Impressive In Making Clear What Data Is Used".[30] He noted that in the case of Research 2000 there were some discrepancies between what Silver reported and what the pollster itself reported. Other researchers questioned aspects of the methodology.[31]

On June 16, 2010, Silver announced on his blog that he is willing to give all pollsters who he had included in his rating a list of their polls that he had in his archive, along with the key information that he used (poll marginals, sample size, dates of administration); and he encouraged the pollsters to examine the lists and the results to compare them with the pollster's own record and make corrections.[538 41]

In September 2014, Silver put into the public domain all of his pollster ratings,[538 42] as well as descriptive summary data for all of the more than 6,600 polls in his data collection for the final three weeks of U.S. Presidential primaries and general elections, state governor elections, and U.S. Senate and U.S. Congress elections for the years 1998–2012.[32] In addition to updating his pollster ratings, he published an updated methodological report.[538 43]

Partnership with The New York Times: 2010–2013

On June 3, 2010, The New York Times and Silver announced that FiveThirtyEight had formed a partnership under which the blog would be hosted by the Times for a period of three years.[33] In legal terms, FiveThirtyEight granted a "license" to the Times to publish the blog. The blog would be listed under the "Politics" tab of the News section of the Times.[34]FiveThirtyEight would thus be subject to and benefit from editing and technical production by the Times, while FiveThirtyEight would be responsible for creating the content.

Silver received bids from several major media entities before selecting the Times.[34][35] Under terms of the agreement, Silver would also write monthly articles for the print version of both the newspaper and the Sunday magazine.[538 6] Silver did not move his blog to the highest bidder, because he was concerned with maintaining his own voice while gaining the exposure and technical support that a larger media company could provide. "There's a bit of a Groucho Marx quality to it [Silver has said].... You shouldn't want to belong to any media brand that seems desperate to have you as a member, even though they'll probably offer the most cash".[36]

The first column of the renamed FiveThirtyEight: Nate Silver's Political Calculus appeared in The Times on August 25, 2010, with the introduction of U.S. Senate election forecasts. At the same time, Silver published a brief history of the blog.[538 44] All columns from the original FiveThirtyEight.com were also archived for public access.[37]

Shortly after 538 relocated to The New York Times, Silver introduced his prediction models for the 2010 elections to the U.S. Senate, the U.S. House of Representatives, and state Governorships. Each of these models relied initially on a combination of electoral history, demographics, and polling. The 538 model had forecast a net pickup of 8 seats by the Republicans in the Senate and 55 seats in the House, close to the actual outcome of a pickup of 6 seats in the Senate and 63 seats in the House.[538 45]

Writers

When the transition to The New York Times was announced, Silver listed his staff of writers for the first time.[37] However, of the seven listed writers, only three of them had published on 538/New York Times by late December 2010: Silver, Renard Sexton and Hale Stewart. Andrew Gelman contributed again in early 2011.[538 46] Brian McCabe published his first article in January 2011.[538 47][c]

Beginning in 2011, one writer who emerged as a regular contributor was Micah Cohen. Cohen provided a periodic "Reads and Reactions" column in which he summarized Silver's articles for the previous couple of weeks, as well as reactions to them in the media and other blogs, and suggested some additional readings related to the subject of Silver's columns. Silver identified Cohen as "my news assistant".[538 48] Cohen also contributed additional columns on occasion.[538 49]

On September 12, 2011, Silver introduced another writer: "FiveThirtyEight extends a hearty welcome to John Sides, a political scientist at George Washington University, who will be writing a series of posts for this site over the next month. Mr. Sides is also the founder of the blog The Monkey Cage,[39] which was named the 2010 Blog of the Year by The Week magazine".[538 50]

In 2016, Columbia Journalism Review published information on Harry J. Enten and identified him as the "whiz kid" of FiveThirtyEight and an example of a new generation of political journalists who are very analytical and data-based.[40]

Adapted from a FiveThirtyEight October 2011 graph published in the New York Times.[538 64]

FiveThirtyEight published a graph showing different growth curves of the news stories covering Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street protests. Silver pointed out that conflicts with the police caused the sharpest increases in news coverage of the protests.[538 64] And he assessed the geography of the protests by analyzing news reports of the size and location of events across the United States.[538 65]

2012 U.S. elections

FiveThirtyEight rolled out the first iteration of its 2012 general election forecasting model on June 7, 2012. The model forecasts both the popular vote and the electoral college vote, with the latter being central to the exercise and involving a forecast of the electoral outcome in each state. In the initial forecast, Barack Obama was estimated to have a 61.8% chance of winning the electoral vote in November 2012. The website provided maps and statistics about the electoral outcomes in each state as well as nationally. Later posts addressed methodological issues such as the "house effects" of different pollsters as well as the validity of telephone surveys that did not call cell phones.[538 66]

From the middle of 2012 until election day, the FiveThirtyEight model updated its estimates of the probability that Barack Obama and Mitt Romney would win a majority of the electoral votes. On election day, November 6, Silver posted his final forecast for each state. On the morning of the November 6, 2012 presidential election, Silver's model gave President Barack Obama a 90.9% chance of winning a majority of the electoral votes.[538 67] At the end of that day, after the ballots had been counted, the 538 model had correctly predicted the winner of all 50 states and the District of Columbia.[43][d] Silver, along with at least two academic-based analysts who aggregated polls from multiple pollsters, thus got not only all 50 state predictions right, but also all 9 of the "swing states".[44] In contrast, individual pollsters were less successful. For example, Rasmussen Reports "missed on six of its nine swing-state polls".[45]

An independent analysis of Silver's state-by-state projections, assessing whether the percentages of votes that the candidates actually received fell within the "margin of error" of Silver's forecasts, found that "Forty-eight out of 50 states actually fell within his margin of error, giving him a success rate of 96 percent. And assuming that his projected margin of error figures represent 95 percent confidence intervals, which it is likely they did, Silver performed just about exactly as well as he would expect to over 50 trials. Wizard, indeed".[46][47] Additional tests of the accuracy of the electoral vote predictions were published by other researchers.[48][49]

Under ESPN ownership

FiveThirtyEight launched its ESPN-owned stage on March 17, 2014. As of July, it had a staff of 20 writers, editors, data visualization specialists, and others.[538 68] By March 2016, this staff had nearly doubled to 37 listed on the masthead, and 7 listed as contributors.[50] The site produced articles under 5 headings: politics, economics, science and health, (cultural) life, and sports. In addition to feature articles it produced podcasts on a range of subjects.

Monthly traffic to the site grew steadily from about 2.8 million unique visitors in April 2014 to 10.7 million unique visitors in January 2016.[51]

2014 U.S. elections

On September 3, 2014, FiveThirtyEight introduced its forecasts for each of the 36 U.S. Senate elections being contested that year.[538 69] At that time, the Republican Party was given a 64 percent chance of holding a majority of the seats in the Senate after the election. However, FiveThirtyEight editor Nate Silver also remarked, "An equally important theme is the high degree of uncertainty around that outcome. A large number of states remain competitive, and Democrats could easily retain the Senate".[538 70] About two weeks later, the forecast showed the Republican chances of holding the majority down to 55 percent.[538 71]

2016 Oscars predictions

FiveThirtyEight sought to apply its mathematical models to the Oscars, and produced internal predictions regarding the subject, predicting four out of six categories correctly.[52] The website also compiled a list of other predictions made by other people using different methods.[53]

2016 U.S. elections

Presidential primary elections

FiveThirtyEight applied two separate models to forecast the 2016 Presidential Primary elections – Polls-Only and Polls-Plus models. The polls-only model relied only on polls from a particular state, while the polls-plus model was based on state polls, national polls and endorsements. For each contest, FiveThirtyEight produced probability distributions and average expected vote shares per both of these models.[54]

As early as June 2015, FiveThirtyEight argued that Donald Trump "isn't a real candidate"[55] and maintained that Trump could not win the nomination, until late in the election season.[56] When Donald Trump became the presumptive Republican nominee in May 2016, New York Times media columnist Jim Rutenberg wrote that "predictions can have consequences" and criticized FiveThirtyEight for underestimating Trump's chances. He argued that by giving "Mr. Trump a 2 percent chance at the nomination despite strong polls in his favor...they also arguably sapped the journalistic will to scour his record as aggressively as those of his supposedly more serious rivals".[57]

In a long retrospective "How I Acted Like A Pundit And Screwed Up On Donald Trump," published in May 2016 after Trump had become the likely nominee, Silver reviewed how he had erred in evaluating Trump's chances early in the primary campaign. Silver wrote, "The big mistake is a curious one for a website that focuses on statistics. Unlike virtually every other forecast we publish at FiveThirtyEight – including the primary and caucus projections I just mentioned – our early estimates of Trump’s chances weren’t based on a statistical model. Instead, they were what we [call] 'subjective odds' – which is to say, educated guesses. In other words, we were basically acting like pundits, but attaching numbers to our estimates. And we succumbed to some of the same biases that pundits often suffer, such as not changing our minds quickly enough in the face of new evidence. Without a model as a fortification, we found ourselves rambling around the countryside like all the other pundit-barbarians, randomly setting fire to things".[58]

On the Democratic side, FiveThirtyEight argued that Sen. Bernie Sanders could "lose everywhere else after Iowa and New Hampshire" [59] and that the "Democratic establishment would rush in to squash" him if he does not.[60]

Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting, a progressive nonprofit media watch group, wrote in May 2016 that FiveThirtyEight "sacrificed its integrity to go after Sanders" and that they have "at times gone beyond the realm of punditry into the realm of hackery – that is, not just treating their own opinions as though they were objective data, but spinning the data so that it conforms to their opinions."[61]

FiveThirtyEight's predictions for each state primary, both for the Republican and the Democratic party nominations, were based on statistical analysis, not on the analyst's opinions. The core data employed were polls, which FiveThirtyEight aggregated for each state (while also considering national polls) using essentially the same method it had employed since 2008. In the 2016 primaries, the projections also took into account endorsements.[62] The website also kept track of the accumulation of national party convention delegates.[63] In a comparison of prediction success published by Bloomberg News after the primary season was completed, FiveThirtyEight's prediction success tied for the highest percentage of correct primary poll winners, at 92%; but it lagged behind PredictWise in predicting a larger set of primaries.[64] Notably, even with FiveThirtyEight's track record of correctly predicting elections that pollsters get wrong, it still missed Bernie Sanders's upset victory in the Michigan primary, for instance, regarded as the 'one of the biggest upsets in modern political history'.[61]

Presidential general election

The final prediction by FiveThirtyEight on the morning of election day (November 8, 2016) was at 10:41AM and had Hillary Clinton with a 71% chance to win the 2016 United States presidential election.[65] while other major forecasters had predicted Clinton to win with at least an 85% to 99% probability.[66][67] FiveThirtyEight's model pointed the possibility of an Electoral College-popular vote split widening in final weeks based on both Clinton's small lead in general polls, but also on Trump's improvement in swing states like Florida or Pennsylvania, mixed with Clinton's poor performing in several of those swing states in comparison with Obama's performing in 2012.[68] The main issues pointed by the forecast model was the unbalance of Clinton's improvement in very populated states like Texas, Georgia (projected safe for Republican) and California (projected safe for Democrats);[68] mixed with her inability to attract white voters without a college degree, an increasing demographic in swing states, in addition to a potential decline in turnout from minorities.[69] In consequence, Clinton's probabilities to win the Electoral College were not improving.[68] Nate Silver also focused on state by state numbers in considered 'must-win' states like Ohio and Florida, plus a consideration of polls' margin of error in advantages of less than three points.[70]

Donald Trump won the election. FiveThirtyEight projected a much higher probability of Donald Trump winning the presidency than other pollsters,[66] a projection which was criticized by Ryan Grim of the Huffington Post as "unskewing" too much in favor of Trump.[71] And while FiveThirtyEight expressed that "nonetheless, Clinton is probably going to win, and she could win by a big margin", the forecaster also made a point about the unreliability of poll trackers in some cases, about a considerable number of undecided voters and about the unpredictable outcome in traditional swing states.[72]

Recognition and awards

In September 2008, FiveThirtyEight became the first blog ever selected as a Notable Narrative by the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University. According to the Foundation, "In his posts, former economic analyst and baseball-stats wunderkind Nate Silver explains the presidential race, using the dramatic tension inherent in the run-up to Election Day to drive his narrative. Come November 5, we will have a winner and a loser, but in the meantime, Silver spins his story from the myriad polls that confound us lesser mortals".[73]

The New York Times described FiveThirtyEight.com in November 2008 as "one of the breakout online stars of the year".[15]

Huffington Post columnist Jason Linkins named FiveThirtyEight.com as No. 1 of "Ten Things that Managed to Not Suck in 2008, Media Edition".[74]

FiveThirtyEight.com is the 2008 Weblog Award Winner for "Best Political Coverage".[75]

FiveThirtyEight.com earned a 2009 "Bloggie" as the "Best Weblog about Politics" in the 9th Annual Weblog Awards.[76]

In April 2009, Silver was named "Blogger of the Year" in the 6th Annual Opinion Awards of The Week, for his work on FiveThirtyEight.com.[77]

In September 2009, FiveThirtyEight.com's predictive model was featured as the cover story in STATS: The Magazine for Students of Statistics.[21]

In November 2009, FiveThirtyEight.com was named one of "Our Favorite Blogs of 2009" ("Fifty blogs we just can't get enough of") by PC Magazine.[78]

In December 2009, FiveThirtyEight was recognized by The New York Times Magazine in its "Ninth Annual Year in Ideas" for conducting "Forensic Polling Analysis" detective work on the possible falsification of polling data by a major polling firm.[79][e]

In November 2010, Editor-in-Chief of PoliticoJohn F. Harris, writing in Forbes magazine, listed Silver as one of seven bloggers among "The Most Powerful People on Earth".[81]

In June 2011, Time's "The Best Blogs of 2011" named FiveThirtyEight one of its Essential Blogs.[82]

April 2013: FiveThirtyEight won a Webby Award for "Best Political Blog" from the International Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences in the 17th annual Webby Awards.[84]

June 2016: FiveThirtyEight was named the "Data Journalism Website of the Year" for 2016 by the Global Editors Network, a Paris-based organization that promotes innovation in newsrooms around the world. FiveThirtyEight won an additional award for "News Data App of the Year (large newsroom)" for “Swing the Election,” an interactive project by Aaron Bycoffe and David Wasserman.[85]

September 2017: The National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine awarded a 2017 Communication Award in the "Online" category to "FiveThirtyEight’s Maggie Koerth-Baker, Ben Casselman, Anna Maria Barry-Jester, and Carl Bialik for "Gun Deaths in America." “A balanced and fact-filled examination of an unfolding crisis, with compelling interactives that are meticulously attentive to data quality and statistics.”[86]

See also

Notes

^Several national firms use the name "Strategic Vision"; only one has been releasing political polling results to the media.

^Berman first worked with FiveThirtyEight.com when he made some provocative discoveries of anomalies in the reported results of the 2009 Election in Iran.[26]

^Why other writers played only a limited role in FiveThirtyEight/NYT was explained in February 2011 in an article in Poynter.[38]

^Although Silver put a "toss-up" tag on the presidential election in Florida, his interactive electoral map on the website painted the state light blue and stated that there was a 50.3% probability that Obama would win a plurality of the state's votes.

^The first of a series of articles challenged Strategic Vision LLC to reveal key information.[80]

^Andrew Romano,"Making His Pitches: Nate Silver, an all-star in the world of baseball stats, may be the political arena's next big draw," Newsweek, June 16, 2008. Archived June 19, 2008, at the Wayback Machine.

^Nate Silver, "How I Acted Like A Pundit And Screwed Up On Donald Trump: Trump’s nomination shows the need for a more rigorous approach," FiveThirtyEight.com, May 18, 2016. "Archived copy". Archived from the original on July 17, 2016. Retrieved July 18, 2016.